Privacy

Reading the Wire needs no account. Public pages set no cookies, and there are no analytics services and no tracking cookies. The Wire’s own scripts, styles and fonts are all served from this site; the only outside service any page loads is the banner ad from adengine.us on the public list pages, described under Advertising below, which also counts one page view per page as a daily total.

The pages for signing in, your account, confirming an address and unsubscribing set one security cookie (wire_csrf) that protects their forms; while paid digests are closed, only the unsubscribe page sets it. It holds a random token and nothing about you.

The theme button remembers light or dark in your own browser's storage. It is never sent to us.

The web server keeps standard access logs (address, page, time, browser name) for security and troubleshooting. They are not used for advertising and are not sold or shared.

A private wire (My Wire) stores only what you type into it: the desks you tick, your watch words, an optional name, and when it was made, changed, last opened and last read by a feed reader. The wire itself stores no email address and no IP address, and only a one-way fingerprint of its secret link. Deleting the wire from its page removes all of it. A wire that nobody opens, reads by feed or changes for 180 days is deleted automatically, and so is an office page left with no wires.

To limit abuse, making a wire adds one to a short-lived counter keyed by a salted one-way hash of your IP address (not the address itself). Counters are deleted after a day.

A private wire's secret link is part of its web address, so it appears in the server's access logs like any other page address. Those logs are kept for security and troubleshooting only, as described above. If you think someone has seen your link, delete the wire and make a new one.

If paid email digests are ever opened, the Wire will store the email addresses you give it, your subscription status and when each digest was sent, and nothing else about you. Sign-in and confirmation emails would be limited by the same kind of counter, keyed by a salted one-way hash of the address or IP. Payments are handled by PayPal; the Wire never sees your card. Each address can unsubscribe with one click. To have your data deleted, write to weldon@weldonpc.com.

Clicking a headline takes you to weldonpc.com, which has its own privacy policy.

Advertising

Since 17 October 2026 the latest list, the desks, the advisory board, the weekly editions, Plans and About show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company behind this site. For now the ads are for WeldonPC’s own services. Search, My Wire pages, the sign-in and account pages, this page and the terms show no ad, so a private wire’s secret link never reaches adengine.us.

To show an ad, your browser loads a script from adengine.us, asks it for one banner, loads the banner image, and reports once that the page was viewed and once that the banner was shown. Like any website, adengine.us receives your IP address, your browser type and the address of this site with those requests.

• No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
• How your IP address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your IP address in a location database kept on its own server (nothing is sent to anyone else), so that ads meant for one area are shown only there. It also uses the address to count each ad view or click only once and to leave out robots and WeldonPC’s own office traffic. The address is not stored with the counts; the temporary entries made from it expire within six hours and are cleared from the server within two days.
• What is kept. Daily totals only: page views for this site, and views and clicks for each ad. The adengine.us web server also keeps a standard access log (IP address, time, address requested, referring site, browser) for security; it is deleted on a rolling schedule.
• Clicking an ad passes through adengine.us, which counts the click, and then opens the advertiser’s site, which has its own privacy policy.
• Nothing about you is sold or shared.