Privacy policy

What is collected

Boundaries is free to read. There is no fee, no subscription and no payment of any kind. To read and view the site, you are asked to sign in with Google. That is the only requirement: no password is created and no separate account is opened.

A sign-in prompt appears after a short time on the site, and you need to sign in to continue reading. When you sign in, five things are recorded: the name on your Google account, the email address on your Google account, the page you were reading when you signed in, the website that linked you to Boundaries (if any), and the date and time of the sign-in.

Nothing else from your Google account is requested or received. The site does not ask for, and cannot see, your contacts, your calendar, your files, your photographs, or any other Google service. The scopes requested are limited to your basic profile and email address.

This privacy policy and the terms of service can always be read without signing in.

Where it is kept

Sign-in records are written to a private Google Sheet belonging to the operator of this site. The sheet is not published, not shared, and not connected to any third-party service. It is used to know roughly who reads the archive and which pages bring them here.

Analytics

The site uses Umami for page analytics. Umami is a privacy-oriented analytics service that sets no cookies, collects no personal data and does not track visitors between websites. It records the page viewed, the referring site, and coarse country-level location. None of that is joined to any sign-in record.

What is never done

Your name and email address are not sold, rented, shared, published, or passed to advertisers, data brokers, or any other third party. They are not used to build an advertising profile. They are not used to send you unsolicited mail.

You may be written to when a new state or a new essay is published, or when the archive publishes something that bears directly on a correction you reported. Nothing else is sent, and if you write to say you would rather not hear from the archive, you will not be written to again.

Removing your record

Write to the address below and your sign-in record will be deleted from the sheet. No reason is required, and no confirmation step is imposed. You will be told once it is done.

Cookies and local storage

The site stores two small values in your browser: your light or dark theme preference, and, once you have signed in, your name and email address, so that you are not asked to sign in again on every visit. Neither is sent anywhere from your browser after that first sign-in. Signing in with Google involves Google's own cookies, governed by Google's privacy policy rather than this one.

Children

The archive is a scholarly reference and is not directed at children. No sign-in should be made by anyone under thirteen.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or how it is used, the change will be described here and dated. The policy was last revised on 27 October 2026.