The site guide and your privacy
The glowing orb in the corner of every page is an AI guide to this site. This page explains, in plain English, what it does with your information and how the site protects itself from abuse.
What you type
Your message is sent to our AI model provider, Venice AI, to write the answer. On our server it is kept in memory for up to three hours so the guide can follow the conversation, then it is gone. It is not written to disk, not added to our knowledge base, not used to train anything and not searched for contact details. If you want Nicholas to get back to you, use the contact page.
What your browser remembers
Nothing is remembered until you use the guide. After that, your own browser keeps a random ID, the pages you have looked at and the topics you asked about (from a fixed list such as "zero trust" or "the music"). It sends these along with your questions so the guide can welcome you back, pick up where you left off and show what's new. We do not keep a profile of you. Press Forget me in the guide to delete all of it, or clear this site's data in your browser.
What we count
- Daily totals of guide events, such as nudges shown and cards clicked, and of topics asked about.
- Thumbs up and down, counted against the pages the guide suggested, so better suggestions rank higher.
- Single words from questions the site had no page for. We only see a word once two different visitors have asked about it; the questions themselves are not kept.
None of this includes what you typed, your IP address or anything that identifies you.
Keeping the site safe
The guide also acts as the site's gatekeeper. It looks at signals such as vulnerability scans, bot behaviour, messages that try to misuse the guide, and what our intent checker (Jev) makes of a message. Depending on what it sees, it may:
- give shorter answers and slow down,
- pause the guide, the prompt-injection lab and the contact form for that visitor for an hour, or
- for an address that sends repeated vulnerability probes, block the whole site for 24 hours.
Only scanner activity can block the site; nothing you type can. Blocked addresses are deleted when the block ends. Other signals are kept for seven days as salted, shortened hashes, never as addresses.
Questions
Email [email protected]. The full privacy policy covers the rest of the site.