Privacy
Privacy notice
This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, carries no advertising and has no accounts. What follows is the short list of what it does touch, and what happens to it.
Effective 28 August 2026 · Last updated 28 August 2026
01Who is responsible for this site
This site is published by the author of Just the Way It Was: White Southerners Remember Jim Crow, Walter P. (Andy) Anderson, Jr., as a companion to the book.
TODO: legal name of the publishing person or entity, postal address, and a contact email at the site’s own domain.
Until that is filled in, the address in section 14 reaches us.
02What we collect
Three things, and nothing else.
| What | When | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Your IP address | On every request, as with any web server | To count requests against a rate limit, so that one script cannot take the Reading Room down or run up the bill. It is held in the server’s memory, in a counter, and is not written to a file. |
| The questions you ask in the Reading Room, and the answers given | Only if you use the Reading Room | To answer the question at all, and to keep a follow-up coherent. The conversation the model works from is held in memory for your sitting. The question and the answer are also written to our database and kept, so we can see what people ask and where the room answers badly — with no IP address, account, cookie or device identifier stored beside them. A question caught by the crisis check is counted without its text. |
| Whatever you put in an email to us | Only if you write to us | To reply. Your email sits in an ordinary mailbox and is kept as ordinary correspondence. |
Our web host, currently Vercel, keeps standard server logs of requests (IP address, time, page requested, user agent) as part of running the service. We do not add anything to those logs, and we do not use them to build a profile of anybody.
03What we do not collect
- No cookies. The site sets none, of any kind, first party or third party. This is why you have not been asked to accept any.
- No third-party analytics. No Google Analytics, no pixels, no session recording, no heatmaps, and no data leaving for anybody else’s server. We do count our own pages: a tally of how many times each address was served on each day, with nothing stored about who asked. It cannot tell two readers apart, and it is not meant to.
- No advertising and no data broking. We do not sell or share personal information, and never have. Under the California Consumer Privacy Act we do not “sell” or “share” personal information as those words are defined there.
- No accounts, no passwords, no names, no addresses. Nothing on this site asks who you are.
- No captcha service. The Reading Room keeps scripts out with a proof of work computed in your own browser, which involves no third party and identifies nobody.
- No newsletter and no mailing list. We will not email you unless you email us first.
One external service is loaded by the page itself: Google Fonts, which serves the typefaces the site is set in. Requesting a font from Google exposes your IP address to Google in the same way that requesting any file from any server does.
04The Reading Room, and Anthropic
When you send a question in the Reading Room, that question is transmitted to Anthropic, PBC, together with the narrator’s chapter, so that Anthropic’s Claude API can produce the answer. There is no way to answer you without doing this. The Reading Room says so above the box you type into, before you type anything, and by sending a question you consent to it.
What that means in practice:
- Anthropic acts as our service provider for this purpose. Under its commercial terms, inputs and outputs sent through the API are not used to train its models, and API logs are retained for a short period for abuse monitoring rather than kept indefinitely.
- We do not send Anthropic your IP address, and we have nothing else about you to send.
- We do not log the text of your questions on our own server, and we do not read them.
- Your conversation is held in our server’s memory so that follow-up questions work. It is discarded when your sitting ends, and in any case no more than two hours after it began. Clearing the panel discards it immediately.
- Answers to opening questions are cached for up to twelve hours so that the same question does not have to be paid for twice. The cache is keyed on the narrator and the wording of the question. It contains no information about who asked.
- Nothing in the Reading Room is written to a database or to disk. Restarting the server erases all of it.
Because your question leaves our server, please do not type personal, confidential or sensitive information into the Reading Room. It is a place to ask a chapter a question.
05Why we hold what we hold
Only for the purposes named above: to serve the site, to answer a question you asked, to keep automated abuse from making the Reading Room unusable or unaffordable, and to reply to correspondence. We do not use any of it for advertising, profiling, scoring, training our own systems, or any purpose you would not expect from the sentence you clicked.
07How long anything is kept
| What | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Rate limiting counters keyed on your IP | 15 minutes for the short window, 24 hours for the daily one, in memory |
| Your Reading Room conversation | Your sitting, up to 2 hours, in memory |
| Cached answers to opening questions | Up to 12 hours, in memory, with no link to who asked |
| Host server logs | Per our host’s retention, currently a matter of days |
| Emails you send us | As long as the correspondence is useful, then deleted |
08Do Not Track and global privacy signals
California law requires a site to say how it responds to a browser’s Do Not Track signal. This site does not track visitors across time or across other sites, and has nothing to switch off, so a Do Not Track header or a Global Privacy Control signal changes nothing about how it behaves: there is no tracking either way. We do not allow any third party to collect personally identifiable information about your activity across other sites from these pages.
09Your rights, and how to use them
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to know what personal information is held about you, to get a copy of it, to have it corrected or deleted, to opt out of its sale or sharing, and not to be discriminated against for asking. That includes residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas and the other states with comprehensive privacy laws.
In practice there is very little for us to give you. We hold no account, no profile and no identifier for you, so we usually cannot connect a request to any record. Where that is the case we will tell you so plainly rather than ask you to prove who you are, which would mean collecting more about you than we hold now.
- To delete a conversation now: press “Clear” in the Reading Room panel, or close the tab. Nothing survives it.
- To make any other request, or to appeal a refusal: write to the address in section 14. We answer within 45 days, and will say why if we cannot do what you asked.
- We do not sell or share personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of.
- We do not use personal information for automated decisions or profiling of any kind.
10Children
This site is written for adults. It is not directed to children, it collects no age or identity information, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has sent us something through the contact address, write to us and we will delete it.
11Security
The site is served over HTTPS. Our key to the Claude API stays on the server and is never sent to your browser, which is the reason the Reading Room needs a server at all. Because almost nothing is stored, there is almost nothing to breach. No method of transmission over the internet is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.
12Readers outside the United States
The site is operated from the United States and hosted there. If you visit from elsewhere, including from the European Union or the United Kingdom, what you send reaches servers in the United States. The lawful basis for the little we process is our legitimate interest in serving and protecting the site, and, for the Reading Room, your consent given by sending a question. You may withdraw it by not sending another.
13Changes to this notice
If this notice changes, the new version is posted on this page and the “last updated” date at the top changes with it. A change that materially affects what we collect or who receives it will also be noted in the Reading Room itself, above the box you type into, so that you meet it before you use the room rather than after.
14Contact
Questions about this notice, or a request under section 9:
TODO: operator legal name and postal address
peggyannanderson1@gmail.com