What this site records, in plain English.

The short version

• This site records your visit — pages, time spent, scroll depth, device, and an approximate location worked out from your IP address.
• Your IP address is recorded. In the EU and UK that counts as personal data, so I am not going to call this “anonymous”.
• My own visit alerts go to a private Telegram chat that only I can read, and each visit is also saved to a private database only I can open. Neither is ever sold, shared, or fed into any marketing list.
• Your IP address is deleted after 90 days. The rest of the visit is deleted after a year.
• This site also runs Google Analytics and Vercel Analytics, and embeds a film from YouTube that loads only if you press play. Those are third parties with their own data practices — details below.
• You can switch my visit alerts off for your browser in one click. See Opting out below.

What my own visit alerts collect

This is a small piece of code I wrote that sends me a notification when someone visits. It records:

From your browser

• Which pages you opened, in what order, and how long you spent on each
• How far down each page you scrolled
• Which site you arrived from, and any campaign tag in the link (?v=, ?ref=, or utm_ values)
• Your browser, operating system, device type, screen size and language settings
• Your timezone, and whether it disagrees with the one implied by your IP
• Whether any real interaction happened at all — this is how I tell a person from a scraper
• Specific actions that signal interest: downloading my résumé, clicking my email, phone or social links, or copying my contact details
• How many times you have visited before, and how long ago that was

Worked out from your IP address

• Your IP address itself
• An approximate city, region, country and postal code. This comes from a lookup table, not from GPS — it is accurate to roughly a city, and the map coordinates are a fixed point for that city rather than your actual position
• Your network provider — the ISP or company whose network you are on. This can reveal an employer if you are browsing from a corporate network

What it does not collect: your name, your email address, your precise location, anything you type, or anything at all from other websites. I never ask your browser for GPS access.

Third-party services

These are run by other companies. Their data handling is governed by their own policies, not mine.

• Google Analytics 4 — measures traffic and on-page behaviour. It sets cookies and shares data with Google. One of the two properties on this site is linked to Google Ads, which means the data may also be used for advertising measurement and remarketing audiences.
• Vercel Analytics & Speed Insights — aggregate page-view counts and page-load performance.
• YouTube — hosts the film on the home page, and only if you press play. Until then the page shows a still image and loads nothing from Google; there is no YouTube cookie, request or script on the page unless you start the video. When you do, it plays from youtube-nocookie.com, which does not set tracking cookies for ads, though YouTube still receives your IP address and playback data as it would on any embed.
• Vercel — hosts this site, so it necessarily processes every request, including your IP address.
• Telegram — delivers my visit alerts to my private chat.
• Public DNS infrastructure — used to look up the hostname attached to your IP, and separately to turn a network number into a readable provider name. The second lookup contains only the network number, never your IP address.

What gets stored in your browser

• vp_visitor — how many times you have visited and when. Persistent, so it survives closing the tab. This is what lets me see a returning reader.
• vp_session — the current visit in progress. Cleared automatically when you close the tab.
• vp_notrack — only exists if you have opted out, and is the thing that keeps you opted out.
• sd_notice_seen — records that you have already been shown the small notice at the bottom of the screen, so it does not reappear on every page.
• Google Analytics sets its own cookies, separately from the above.

How long it is kept

Each visit is saved to a private database so I can see who has been reading this site over time. It is hosted in the United States, and I am the only person with access.

• Your IP address is deleted after 90 days. It is the part that could identify you, so it goes first. The rest of the visit — pages, timings, country, network — stays.
• The whole visit is deleted after 1 year. Nothing is kept beyond that.
• A scheduled job does this automatically once a day. It is not something I have to remember to run.

The Telegram alerts stay in my private chat until I delete them. Anything stored in your browser stays until you clear it. Google and Vercel retain their own data according to their own settings, not mine.

Opting out

To stop my visit alerts for this browser, add ?notrack=1 to any page address on this site and load it once:

https://sumandebnath.houseofnamus.com/?notrack=1

That setting lives in your browser and persists until you clear your site data. Use ?notrack=0 to turn alerts back on.

It only covers my own beacon. To opt out of Google Analytics, use Google's browser opt-out add-on, block cookies for this site, or use any ad blocker — most block it by default.

Using this work

A different question, but it gets asked in the same breath, so it is worth answering here. This page covers what I do with your data. What you may do with mine — the code, the writing, the models — is its own page.

The short version: it is my personal work and none of it is open source. Reading it, linking to it and quoting a line with credit are all fine. Copying the code, cloning a repository into something of your own, or republishing the writing needs an email first — and the answer is usually yes.

Your rights, and getting in touch

If you want to know what I hold about a visit, or want it deleted, email me and I will do it. Visits are stored in a database I can search, so the more detail you can give me — roughly when you visited, and from where — the faster I can find yours and remove it, along with the matching Telegram messages.

This is a personal portfolio, not a company. If something here reads as unclear or wrong, tell me and I will fix it.