poietic.tech is the personal site of Benjamin Small. It has no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels, and no third-party scripts on the site itself. The only exception is the sign-in service's create-account and reset-password pages, which load Cloudflare Turnstile. If you only read the site, nothing about you is stored anywhere.
What this policy covers
It covers poietic.tech — the website at https://poietic.tech, its blog at https://blog.poietic.tech, where comments and your profile live, its video meetings at https://meetings.poietic.tech, where creating a room needs the same sign-in, its issue tracker at https://issues.poietic.tech, where you sign in with the same account, and its sign-in service at https://auth.poietic.tech. Other poietic.tech sites, such as exile.poietic.tech and games.poietic.tech, do not use this sign-in and are outside this policy. There is no mobile app and no separate product.
Who is responsible
Benjamin Small, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. For anything in this document, including a request to see or delete your data, email ben@poietic.tech.
If you only read
No account, no cookies, no collection. The site is static files served from a Cloudflare Worker. Cloudflare processes the request in order to deliver the page, as any host must, and its network-level logging is described under Processors.
If you sign in
Signing in is optional and exists for three purposes: to let you comment on a post at blog.poietic.tech, to let you create a room at meetings.poietic.tech, and to let you use the issue tracker at issues.poietic.tech. Signing in with GitHub or Google gives this site:
- Your email address — only if the provider reports it as verified. An unverified address is refused and no account is created.
- Your name as the provider reports it.
- A link to your avatar image — the URL, not the image.
- Your account identifier at that provider — an opaque number, used to recognise you on return.
You can instead create an account with only an email address. That stores your email address, confirmed by a link sent to it, and a password hash: a salted, one-way transformation that cannot be turned back into your password, which is itself never stored. GitHub, Google and a password can all be connected to one account, as long as they share a verified email address.
Your email is the account's unique identity. It is never displayed, except to you and to the issue tracker's administrators, and never shared, and it is used to contact you only to send a sign-in link you asked for (creating an account, resetting a password, or adding one), and to tell you when a command line signs in to your account, naming the city and country it signed in from. Replies go to support@poietic.tech. There is no mailing list.
Each sign-in also records a session: when it began, when it expires, the browser's user-agent string, and the IP address it was created from. These exist so a session can be recognised and revoked; they are not used to build a profile of you.
Password sign-in keeps two short-lived records as well: a hash of each emailed link, until up to about two days after it is used or expires, and the email address and time of each failed password attempt (no IP address), for up to about two days, so that repeated guessing can be slowed down. A nightly cleanup deletes them.
If you comment
A comment stores its text, the display name you had at the moment you posted, a timestamp, and an internal reference to your account. Comments are reviewed before they appear, so what you write is visible to the site owner whether or not it is ever published.
The display name is frozen at posting time and does not change if you later rename yourself. That is deliberate — a published comment keeps the name it was approved under.
Comments are public once approved. Do not put anything in one you would not want on a public web page indefinitely.
If you use the issue tracker
Signing in at issues.poietic.tech creates a tracker profile from your account: your name, a handle, the link to your avatar, and your email address, refreshed from your account while you use it. A new profile can do nothing until the site owner approves it, unless the owner has already invited you.
The tracker stores what you add to it: issues, comments, links between issues, and attachments. It also keeps a history of every change, with the earlier version of whatever changed, so text you edit or delete stays in that history. A command line or AI agent you sign in to work on your behalf is recorded as an agent that you own, and its changes are attributed to it.
Who sees it depends on the project. In a public project, its issues, comments, attachments and history, with the names of the people who wrote them, are readable by anyone, without signing in. In a private project, only its members and the tracker's administrators can see them. Your email address is shown only to you and to the tracker's administrators.
Tracker profiles are deactivated, never deleted, so that shared work keeps its history and its authors. Deleting your poietic.tech account stops you signing in to the tracker, but does not remove your tracker profile or what you wrote there. To have them removed or anonymised, email ben@poietic.tech.
Cookies
Four, all strictly necessary, all set only after you choose to sign in. None are used for advertising or analytics.
__Secure-poietic-session— proves you are signed in. Expires after 10 minutes and is renewed automatically.__Host-poietic-refresh— renews the above. Lasts 30 days, and is readable only byauth.poietic.tech.__Host-poietic-oauth— protects the sign-in exchange itself against tampering. Lives for the duration of one login and is then discarded.poietic_issues_session— proves you are signed in to the issue tracker, and is readable only byissues.poietic.tech. Expires after 15 minutes and is renewed while the tracker is open.
Signing out revokes the session on the server and clears these cookies.
Storage on your device
If you begin writing a comment on the blog, the draft is saved in your browser's local storage so that signing in — which navigates you away — does not lose what you typed. It never leaves your device until you press Post, and it is deleted the moment the comment is submitted.
The issue tracker keeps two settings in your browser's local storage: your light or dark theme, and a note that you have signed in, so that it can sign you back in quietly. Neither leaves your device.
Who else is involved
Your information is not sold, rented, or shared. Three parties are unavoidably involved:
- Cloudflare hosts the site, runs the code, and stores the databases and the issue tracker's attachments. Request logging is enabled on the sign-in service and the issue tracker, which means Cloudflare holds ordinary server logs of requests to them. It also delivers the sign-in emails you ask for, and runs Turnstile, which checks that a person, not an automated script, is submitting the create-account and reset-password forms. Turnstile runs only on those two pages at auth.poietic.tech.
- GitHub and Google receive a sign-in request only at the moment you choose one of them, and tell this site the details listed above. This site never sees your GitHub or Google password.
One consequence worth stating plainly: on your profile page at blog.poietic.tech, your avatar is loaded directly from GitHub's or Google's servers, which means that request reveals your IP address to them. The issue tracker shows avatars beside people's names and loads them the same way. Comment threads do not load avatars at all, so browsing poietic.tech or the blog involves no third-party requests.
Google user data
When you choose Continue with Google, poietic.tech requests three OAuth scopes and no others. Each is listed here with what it returns and the single purpose it serves:
| Scope | What it gives us | Why |
|---|---|---|
openid | A stable identifier for your Google account (sub) | To recognise you as the same person when you return |
email | Your email address and whether Google has verified it | To identify your account uniquely. An unverified address is refused |
profile | Your name and a link to your profile picture | To show a name beside a comment you post, or beside your work in the issue tracker |
That is the entire extent of it. poietic.tech does not request, receive, or store access to your Gmail, Drive, Contacts, Calendar, or any other Google service, and it never sees your Google password. The access token Google issues is used once, at sign-in, to read the three fields above, and is not retained afterwards.
Revoking access. You can disconnect poietic.tech from your Google account at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Doing so stops any future sign-in. To also delete the account and data held here, use Delete account on your account page — the two are separate actions, and revoking at Google does not by itself erase what this site already stored.
Use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements. The only Google data requested is your name, email address, and profile picture, and it is used solely to create your account and attribute your comments and your work in the issue tracker. It is not transferred to anyone, not used for advertising, and not read by humans except where you have published it in a comment or in the issue tracker, where the tracker's administrators see your email address in order to manage access, or where it is necessary to resolve a specific problem you have reported.
How long things are kept, and how to have them deleted
- Account record (name, email, avatar link, provider id) — kept until you ask for it to be deleted.
- Password hash — kept until you remove the password or delete the account.
- Emailed sign-in links and failed sign-in attempts — deleted up to about two days after they expire or occur.
- Comments — kept while published. When you delete your account they are anonymised or removed, as you choose.
- Issue tracker profile, content and history — kept while the tracker runs, including after you delete your account. Removed or anonymised on request, by email.
- Issue tracker sessions — stored only as a hash, and deleted when you sign out or when a renewal replaces them.
- Session records (including the IP address and user-agent of each sign-in) — kept for up to 30 days, or 90 for a command-line login. A command-line login also records the country it signed in from and when, and from which IP address and country, it was last used. A session you sign out of or revoke is kept for up to 7 more days after sign-out, then deleted.
- Pending command-line sign-ins (the requesting computer's IP address, city and user-agent, shown to you when you approve it) — kept for about a day, then deleted.
- Google access token — not retained. Used once at sign-in and discarded.
To delete your account, sign in and choose Delete account on your account page. You choose whether your comments are removed or kept with the name replaced by "Deleted account". The account, its sign-in methods, sessions, password hash, sign-in links and failed-attempt records are removed immediately. Comments are handled the same moment; if the site is briefly unavailable the step is retried automatically and completes within a day. The issue tracker is not covered by this step: see If you use the issue tracker. You can also email ben@poietic.tech from the address on the account, or from any address if you say which account you mean; requests are actioned within 30 days and in practice much sooner.
Your rights
Whatever your jurisdiction, you may ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. Email ben@poietic.tech and it will be handled. If you are in the EEA or UK, the lawful basis for the sign-in, comment and issue tracker data is the performance of a service you asked for; there is no processing based on legitimate-interest profiling, because there is no profiling.
Deleting an account removes the account record. Comments already published are handled as you ask — removed, or kept with the name detached — because removing an identity and erasing someone's words are different decisions.
Children
This site is not directed at children under 13 and accounts are not knowingly created for them. If you believe one exists, email the address above and it will be deleted.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. Changes that affect what is collected or who it goes to will be described here rather than made quietly.