Privacy policy
Last updated .
We make videos about cookies and online tracking, so it would be a bit rich to do it ourselves. Here’s exactly what happens when you visit.
What we count
We use Umami, a privacy-friendly analytics tool, running on our own server. When you open a page, it records:
- which page you looked at, and when
- the site that sent you here, if any (for example YouTube or a search engine)
- which video sent you, if you typed the short address from one (like speak4geeks.com/listening): it adds a label to the link that names the video, not you
- roughly where you are: the country, and sometimes the region and city, worked out from your internet address
- the kind of device (phone, tablet or computer), the browser, the operating system, the screen size and the language it’s set to
That’s it. We look at the totals, like “40 people read the Wi-Fi page today, mostly on phones,” to decide what to explain next.
What we don’t do
- No cookies. Umami doesn’t use them, and neither does anything else on this site (until you press play on a video, see below). That’s why there’s no cookie banner.
- No personal details. Your internet address is used to guess your country and then thrown away, not stored. We never ask for your name or email.
- No following you around. To tell one visit from another without a cookie, Umami turns a few details into a scrambled code, and that code changes every month. We can’t track you across other websites, and we can’t recognize you next month.
- No selling, no sharing, no ads.
Videos and YouTube
A video on this site starts as a picture with a play button. That picture comes from our own server, so just opening a page tells Google nothing. When you press play, the YouTube player loads from youtube-nocookie.com, YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode. From that moment, you’re watching on YouTube: Google may store cookies or similar data in your browser, and its privacy policy applies to what it collects.
The same goes for any link that takes you to another site, like the sources on each page: their rules apply there.
Fonts and everything else
The fonts, pictures and code that make up these pages are all served from our own server. Your browser doesn’t call any other company to show them.
Like every website, our server has to see your internet address to send you the page. It may keep short technical logs to keep the site running and safe; they aren’t used to build a picture of you.
Our YouTube statistics tool
Behind the scenes, Daniel Gélinas uses a small read-only tool to see how the Speak4Geeks channel is doing, through the YouTube API Services. It signs in with the channel owner’s own Google account and reads only that channel’s statistics, like views and how long people watch. It can’t post, change or delete anything. The numbers are saved as dated snapshots in our private project files, used only to see which videos help people, kept while they’re useful for that, and deleted after that. They are never sold or shared. It doesn’t touch any visitor’s data, or anyone else’s YouTube account.
It works under the YouTube Terms of Service and the Google Privacy Policy. Access can be removed at any time from the Google account’s security settings.
Changes
If any of this changes, for example when we add a tool that talks to another service, this page will say so first, and the date at the top will move.