Privacy Policy

Controller

The controller for the processing described on this page is:

Cognate Press

Email: contact@cognate.press

Everything on this page is the responsibility of the controller named above: the processing described below, the legal basis given for each part of it, and the rights set out further down. If you need the controller’s details in a form that block does not give you — for a request under those rights, or for a complaint to a supervisory authority — ask at contact@cognate.press and they will be provided.

Scope

This policy covers cognate.press and nothing else. The imprint publishes seven independent technical publications, each on its own domain and each with its own controller and its own privacy policy. Following a link from here to one of them — or to any other site — takes you outside the scope of this page, and the policy published on the domain you arrive at is the one that applies there.

The imprint hosts none of those sites and receives no data from them. There is no shared account, no shared identifier, and nothing that follows a reader from one domain in the network to another.

Server logs

This site is static and is served by Cloudflare Pages. Delivering a page to you means Cloudflare receives and records your IP address, your browser’s user agent string, the URL requested, and the timestamp of the request. That data is what makes it possible to return the page at all, and what makes it possible to tell ordinary traffic apart from an attack.

Legal basis: legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. The interest is operating the site and defending it from abuse — denial-of-service traffic, automated scraping, probing for vulnerabilities. The balancing test comes out this way because the data is used only to deliver and protect the site: it is not combined into a profile, not used to target anything at you, and not passed on for anyone else’s purposes.

Retention: Cloudflare’s own operational retention for log and security data. The imprint does not set that period and keeps no copy. There is no application server behind this site and no log of its own.

Cookies and local storage

This site sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device.Not a first-party cookie, not a third-party cookie, not an analytics cookie, and — unlike the publications in the network, which remember the theme you pick — not so much as a preference key. There is no theme control on this site and nothing else that writes to your browser.

Because nothing is stored on your terminal equipment and nothing already stored there is read, the consent requirement in Art. 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive is not engaged at all, and no banner is shown. The reasoning, and the one thing outside this site’s control, are set out in full on the Cookie Policy page.

The newsletter

The Cognate letter is optional, and nothing happens with your address unless you ask for it.

What is collected: your email address, plus the subscription and confirmation timestamps recorded by Buttondown, the service that runs the list.

Legal basis: consent, Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR. Consent is given by ticking a checkbox beside the subscription form. The box is never pre-ticked, and the form cannot be submitted without it.

Double opt-in: submitting the form sends one email asking you to confirm. No address receives the letter before the confirmation link in that email is clicked, and an address that is never confirmed receives nothing further.

Withdrawing consent: every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link. Withdrawing is as easy as subscribing was, takes effect immediately, and does not affect the lawfulness of anything sent before you withdrew.

Processor: Buttondown acts as a processor under Art. 28 GDPR. It stores the subscriber list and sends the mail on instruction, and does not use the addresses for its own purposes.

Retention: your address is held for as long as you stay subscribed. On unsubscribe it is removed from the subscriber list and kept on a suppression list, which exists for one reason — to make sure a later import cannot mail you again — and which holds the address and nothing else. If you would rather it were erased outright, ask at contact@cognate.press and it will be.

International transfer: Buttondown is established in the United States, so subscribing transfers your address outside the EEA. The safeguard relied on is the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses under Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR, as offered in Buttondown’s data processing agreement. That agreement is being confirmed; if the safeguard in force turns out to be Buttondown’s certification under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework instead, this section is corrected to name it.

Email you send us

Writing to contact@cognate.press means we hold your address and whatever you put in the message, for as long as the exchange is live and afterwards while there is a reason to keep it — an unresolved rights request, a correction still being worked through, a permission granted that someone may later need to point to.

Legal basis: legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR — answering a message that was sent to us. Where the message is itself a request under the GDPR, the basis is the legal obligation in Art. 6(1)(c) to deal with it. Correspondence is not added to the newsletter list, and writing to us subscribes you to nothing.

What this site does not do

There is no advertising and no ad network. There is no analytics product of any kind on this site — no page-view counter, no beacon, no tag manager, cookieless or otherwise. There is no profiling, no behavioural targeting, and no automated decision-making of the kind Art. 22 GDPR governs. No personal data is sold, rented, or shared for anyone else’s marketing.

The pages load no third-party resources at all: no video players, no social widgets, no comment system, no fonts fetched from someone else’s domain — the two typefaces are bundled into the site’s own build. Nothing here is designed to recognise you between visits, and nothing here could.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

• Access (Art. 15) — ask whether personal data about you is processed, and receive a copy of it.
• Rectification (Art. 16) — have inaccurate data corrected.
• Erasure (Art. 17) — have data deleted.
• Restriction (Art. 18) — have processing limited while a dispute over it is resolved.
• Portability (Art. 20) — receive data you provided in a structured, machine-readable format, where the processing rests on consent or a contract.
• Objection (Art. 21) — object to processing based on legitimate interests, on grounds relating to your particular situation.
• Withdrawal of consent (Art. 7(3)) — withdraw newsletter consent at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing carried out before the withdrawal.

To exercise any of them, email contact@cognate.press. A response follows within one month of the request, as Art. 12(3) GDPR requires; if a request is complex the period can be extended, and you are told inside that first month if it is.

Complaints

If you consider the processing described here to breach the GDPR, you can lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. Art. 77 gives you the choice of the authority in the EU member state where you live, where you work, or where the alleged infringement took place. Raising it at contact@cognate.press first is welcome, but nothing obliges you to do that before complaining.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes in a material way, the date shown at the top of this page changes with it. A change that describes new processing is published before that processing starts, not after.