Privacy Policy

1Who we are

CandyWrite is an independent publishing platform for essays on technology, design, and creative work. This policy explains what happens to your information when you read, write, comment, or subscribe here. It covers this website and the emails we send.

CandyWrite decides what data is collected and why. For anything about your data, write to support@candywrite.com.

2Information you give us

Creating an account

Signing up with email means we store your email address, your name, and a username. Your password is handled by our authentication provider and stored only as a hash: nobody at CandyWrite, including administrators, can read it or recover it for you.

Signing in with Google instead means Google shares your name, email address, and profile picture with us. That is the entire list, and Google shows it to you on its consent screen before you agree. We never receive your Google password and cannot see anything else in your Google account.

Your profile

Everything beyond the basics is optional: a bio, a website link, an avatar, a cover image, and X, GitHub, or LinkedIn handles. Leave them blank and nothing breaks. You can edit or clear them at any time from your profile settings.

What you publish

Posts, comments, likes, and images you upload are stored so they can be shown to readers. Uploads are capped at 5 MB and limited to image files.

The newsletter

Subscribing stores your email address and nothing else. The consent checkbox is not pre-ticked and the form refuses to submit without it, so nobody ends up on the list by accident. Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link.

3What we measure automatically

We keep a small amount of aggregate data so writers can see how their work travels. None of it is tied to you as an individual.

• Post views. A counter per post, and a total per post per day. Each reader counts once per post per day: to tell readers apart we keep a one-way hash of your IP address and browser type (or your account id, if signed in), mixed with a random value that is replaced every day. At the end of the day the hashes and that value are deleted, so there is no lasting record of who viewed what.
• Referrers. Which site a reader arrived from, stored per post. The query string is stripped before saving, so anything after the ? in a link — including tracking parameters someone else attached — never reaches our database.
• Advertising counts. When a sponsor’s ad is actually seen or clicked, we add to a total. Those totals are broken down only by country (a two-letter code such as PK), device type (mobile, tablet, or desktop), and which page the ad appeared on.

We do not store IP addresses. Your IP is visible to our servers for the instant a request is handled — this is unavoidable on the internet — and is used only to rate-limit abuse and, as described above, to build the same-day hash that stops one reader being counted twice. The IP itself is never written to the database and never attached to a click or an account.

Microsoft Clarity

Separately from those counters, and to see where the site is confusing or broken, we use Microsoft Clarity. It records how visitors use a page — clicks, scrolling, mouse movement, and which pages they visit in what order — and turns that into heatmaps and replayable session recordings. Clarity also notes your device type, browser, and approximate location.

In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, Clarity only runs after you accept it in the cookie banner. Until then it is not loaded at all. Everywhere else it runs by default, and you can turn it off. Either way, you can change your answer at any time from Cookie settings at the bottom of every page.

We do not send Clarity your name, email address, or account ID. Clarity masks what you type into form fields such as passwords and email addresses, and the admin panel is masked entirely. Because Clarity runs in your browser, Microsoft receives your IP address the way any server your browser contacts does, and handles it under the Microsoft Privacy Statement.

Google Analytics

We also use Google Analytics to count visits and understand where readers come from. It records which pages are viewed, how long a visit lasts, the site or search that sent you here, and your device type, browser, and approximate location. We use it only for these traffic reports: Google Signals, advertising features, and ad personalisation are turned off.

Google Analytics follows the same cookie choice as Clarity. In the EEA, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland it only loads after you accept; everywhere else it runs by default until you decline. We do not send it your name, email address, or account ID. Google receives your IP address when your browser loads it and handles the data under the Google Privacy Policy.

4What we deliberately do not do

This list matters as much as the one above, so it is worth stating plainly. On CandyWrite there is:

• No analytics beyond Microsoft Clarity and Google Analytics, described above. No advertising pixels, and no Facebook or other social tracking scripts.
• No behavioural advertising. Ads here are booked directly with us and shown to everyone in a slot the same way. Nothing about you is used to choose which ad you see.
• No advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and no data shared with ad networks or data brokers.
• No selling, renting, or trading of personal information. Not now, and it is not a business model we are keeping in reserve.
• No building of profiles about your reading habits, and no automated decisions that affect you.

5Cookies and browser storage

We set no advertising cookies. The only analytics cookies are Microsoft Clarity’s and Google Analytics’, and in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland they are set only after you accept them in the cookie banner. Everything else here is the minimum the site needs to work.

• Session cookies. Set by our authentication provider once you sign in, so you stay signed in as you move between pages. Signing out clears them.
• Theme preference. Your light or dark choice is kept in your browser’s local storage. It never leaves your device.
• Posts you have read. A marker per post in your browser’s local storage, so reopening a post does not count as a new view. It never leaves your device.
• A dismissal flag. If you close the newsletter prompt, a marker in session storage stops it reappearing for the rest of your visit. It disappears when you close the tab.
• Your cookie choice. cw_consent remembers whether you accepted or declined analytics, for six months, so the banner does not ask on every visit.
• Your region. cw_geo holds your two-letter country code for the length of your visit, so the site knows whether it has to ask before analytics run. We do not store it anywhere on our side.
• Analytics cookies. Microsoft Clarity sets _clck, which recognises the same browser across visits for up to a year, and _clsk, which groups the pages of one visit into a single session and lasts a day. Clarity may also set cookies on its own clarity.ms domain. Google Analytics sets _ga, which recognises the same browser across visits for up to two years, and _ga_Z59JT4SDWD, which keeps track of the current session.

Changing your mind. Use Cookie settings at the bottom of any page to accept or decline analytics at any time. Declining deletes the Clarity and Google Analytics cookies and stops both straight away.

The theme preference and the dismissal flag stay in your browser and are never sent to us. Clearing your site data removes all of the above; you will be signed out, the theme resets, and the banner asks again where it applies.

6Who else touches your data

We use a small number of services to run the site. They process data on our instructions and for no purpose of their own.

• Our database provider stores accounts, posts, comments, and uploaded images, and runs the sign-in system.
• Google runs Google Analytics, which receives the visit statistics described under What we measure automatically. If you choose to sign in with Google, that sign-in is also governed by Google’s own privacy policy as well as this one.
• Our email provider delivers account and newsletter mail, and therefore handles the address it is being sent to.
• Microsoft runs Clarity, which receives the usage data described under What we measure automatically.
• Our hosting provider serves the site and tells us the visitor’s country, which is the only geographic signal we record.

These providers operate internationally, so your data may be processed outside your country. Beyond them, we disclose personal information only where the law requires it of us.

7What is public, and what is not

CandyWrite is a publishing platform, so some information is public by design. Once you publish a post or leave a comment, your username, display name, avatar, bio, and any social links you added are visible to anyone — signed in or not — and may be indexed by search engines.

Your email address is never shown publicly. It is not on your profile, not in a post, not in a comment, and not exposed by any public part of the site.

Drafts stay private to you until you choose to publish them.

8Email we send you

Your address is used for these, and nothing else:

• Account mail — a welcome message, password resets you asked for, and a confirmation when your password changes. These are part of running an account and cannot be switched off while the account exists.
• Activity notifications — someone commented on your post, or liked it. You control these per type in your profile settings.
• The newsletter and weekly digest — only if you asked for them, and every one carries an unsubscribe link that works in a single click, with no need to sign in.

9Your rights and how to use them

You do not need to email anyone to exercise most of these. They are buttons in the product.

• See and correct your data. Profile settings holds everything you have given us, and it is all editable.
• Choose what we email you. Notification preferences live in the same place.
• Leave the newsletter. Use the link at the bottom of any newsletter email.
• Delete everything. Deleting your account removes your profile and, with it, your posts, comments, and likes, along with your sign-in record. This is immediate and cannot be undone — export anything you want to keep first.
• Ask for a copy. Write to support@candywrite.com and we will send you the data held against your account.

Depending on where you live you may have further rights — to object to processing, to restrict it, or to complain to a data protection authority. Ask us and we will help rather than argue.

10How long we keep things

Account data lives as long as your account does. Deleting the account removes it, and the removal cascades to your posts, comments, and likes rather than leaving orphaned records behind.

Newsletter subscriptions are kept until you unsubscribe. After that we retain the record marked inactive, so an unsubscribe is not quietly undone by a later signup form.

Aggregate counters — view totals, referrer counts, advertising totals — carry no personal identifiers and survive deletion, because there is nothing in them to trace back to a person.

11Security

The site is served over HTTPS. Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider and never stored in readable form. Access to data is restricted so that one account cannot read another’s private data, and administrative functions are limited to site administrators.

No system is perfectly secure, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. If you find a vulnerability, please report it to support@candywrite.com before disclosing it publicly, and we will work with you.

12Children

CandyWrite is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has created an account, tell us at support@candywrite.com and we will remove it.

13Changes to this policy

As the product changes, this policy changes with it, and the date at the top always reflects the current version. If a change materially affects how we handle your data, we will say so on the site or by email rather than relying on you to notice a new date.

14Contact

Privacy questions, data requests, and security reports go to support@candywrite.com. For anything else, including legal correspondence, write to hello@candywrite.com. We read both.