PRIVACY
What Spotlight Dispatch collects, what it does not, and the one thing that changed on June 1, 2026.
Here is the whole of it, current as of June 1, 2026. We use Google Analytics to measure traffic — how many people open a story, roughly where in the world they came from, what they read next. It is the same ordinary web-traffic measurement most of the internet runs. For our first year we ran none, on principle. That principle cost us: by the end of May, only a handful of our 150-some articles had been indexed by Google at all, and we decided the work was worth more seen than unseen.
Being honest about that means being honest about what Google Analytics is. It sets cookies. It sees your IP address, the way it does on most sites you visit. If that bothers you, any tracker blocker stops it cold — and every word on this site still loads, in full, with nothing withheld. We are not going to tell you it is invisible. It is not. It is a traffic counter run by the largest advertising company on earth, and we turned it on with our eyes open.
What has not changed is the rest of it. We do not ask for your email. There is no sign-up, no login, no account, no wall between you and a single sentence here. We do not collect, sell, or broker personal data. There is no paywall and never has been. Our real phone number and a real email sit at the top of every page, because we hold ourselves to the same door we ask the powerful to open.
And the load-bearing one, the promise the rest is built on: our influence is not for sale. No advertiser, investor, PAC, foundation, or federal grant decides a word of what runs here — because none of them pays for any of it. If we ever sell advertising, it will buy space on the page and nothing else; it will never buy a say in what the page says. That line does not move.
If any of this changes again, we will say so here, dated, and leave the old version standing underneath — the way the original statement stands below this one.
— Spotlight Dispatch · updated June 1, 2026
Archived · superseded June 1, 2026
What this page said before June 1, 2026, preserved here unedited, as the record of what we promised then. Parts of it are no longer true — we now run Google Analytics, as stated above. We leave it standing anyway. We do not quietly rewrite what we said.
NO TRACKING
A short note from Spotlight Dispatch about what we do not collect, sell, share, or pretend not to know.
Most websites you visit are watching you. They identify your device, fingerprint your browser, count your scrolls, time your hovers, log your IP address, drop cookies, hand the data to advertisers, and sell whatever shapes can be made from your behavior. They do this whether or not you read what they wrote.
We do not.
We have not installed Google Analytics. We have not installed any third-party tracker — no Meta pixel, no LinkedIn pixel, no advertising tag, no fingerprinting library, no session recorder, no heatmap. We do not log your IP address. We do not set cookies. We do not have an “essential cookies” banner because we do not have any cookies to disclose. We do not share data with anyone, because we do not have data to share.
What we do is keep one integer per article. When the server renders a page, the counter for that article goes up by one. That is the entire data model: slug → count. No IP. No cookie. No user agent. No timestamp per click. No client-side beacon — there is nothing in your browser pinging us back. The increment happens on our server while it is rendering the page you asked for, and then it is done.
We publish those numbers openly at /snuck-by because if we are going to count anything we think you should be able to see what we counted. The number tells us a story got loaded N times. It tells us nothing about who, when, or where from.
That is the entire policy.
Our hosting provider — Vercel — sees inbound HTTP requests at the platform level, the way any host would. We have not enabled their analytics product. We have not connected a logging service. We have not piped traffic to any analytics vendor. Nothing is “phoning home” from your visit to anywhere except the page you asked for.
If any of that ever changes, we will tell you on this page first.
Thank you for reading. We mean it without anyone counting.
— Spotlight Dispatch
No paywall · no email · no personal data · Read more
from the people at I am Easy to Use LLC