Privacy Policy
What peterengineers.ai knows about you, when it knows it, and what you can do about it — the same rights whether you are in the EU or in Switzerland.
Who is responsible
Peter Wiederkehr operates peterengineers.ai as a personal site and is the controller for everything described below. Write to peter@peterengineers.ai about anything on this page — a question, a request to see what is stored about you, or a request to delete it — and the Imprint says who stands behind the site.
What this policy covers
This covers peterengineers.ai, including the parts that only exist once you sign in. Two laws apply to it — the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) — and rather than sorting readers by where they are, this site gives everyone the same rights and the same treatment under both. Sites linked from here run under their own policies and nothing on this page speaks for them.
Reading the site
Reading needs no account, no consent and no answer to the cookie banner, and if you read in the language your browser already asks for, the site sets no cookie at all unless you accept analytics. Ask for the other language and one cookie appears: it holds a language code, it is there so a link without a language in it lands you in the right one, it is never used to recognise you, and it goes when you close the browser. Your lens, your light or dark preference and your answer to the cookie banner stay in this browser — none of the three leaves the device unless you sign in, and clearing your browser data removes them. The pages are files built in advance, so unless you accept analytics, nothing records what you opened or how long you stayed. The web server in front of them keeps no log of your requests. Only when a request fails does it write a line with your IP address, so that the fault can be investigated — a legitimate interest under Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR. Those lines are not passed on, are used only to find the fault, and are overwritten within a few days.
Signing in
Signing in is entirely optional: everything readable on this site is readable without it, and only the reading list, the like button and the email need it. The sign-in itself happens on a separate sign-in service, which is where your email address and password live and which confirms your address with a mail before you can sign in at all and sends the mail that resets a forgotten password. When you come back, the site leaves an encrypted cookie in your browser holding the identifier that service knows you by, your email address and the tokens the site needs to act for you; no script can read it, it is encrypted rather than merely signed, and it expires thirty days after your last visit, or as soon as you sign out. Three short-lived cookies carry the sign-in itself and are deleted ten minutes later at the latest. The first signed-in request also creates an account on the site’s own side, and it holds four things and no more: that identifier, your address, whether the address is confirmed, and the date the account was made. Your address arrives there inside the signed token the site sends on your behalf, which is also how it stays in step with the one the sign-in service holds, so changing it there changes it here. All of this exists to deliver the signed-in features you asked for, which is what makes it lawful under Article 6(1)(b) of the GDPR — and if you never sign in, none of it happens.
What your account remembers
Four things follow your account instead of this browser, and every one of them is something you chose to do: the Insights you liked, which also add one to a public and anonymous count; the Insights on your reading list, which are private and never counted; your lens and your light or dark preference, stored as short keys and values so a new device paints the way the last one did; and, if you subscribed to the email about new Insights, what you chose for it. Each is stored because it is the feature you switched on and cannot work without it, which is the same Article 6(1)(b) basis as the account itself. All of it hangs off your account’s subject and nothing else. Your account holds no reading history, no record of which pages you opened, no scroll positions and no profile — the site does not build one and the account is not shaped to hold one. There is no automated decision here that has legal effect for you; the only thing chosen automatically is which new Insights match the lenses you picked. Unliking removes the like, unsaving removes the save, and changing a preference replaces it.
The email about new Insights
You receive email only if you switch it on, and you can only switch it on with an address that has already been confirmed for your account — that confirmed address plus the signed-in click is your consent under Article 6(1)(a), which is why no confirmation mail is sent on top of it. What is stored is what you chose: which lenses, which language, how often, the date you consented, and a random token that makes the unsubscribe link in every mail work without signing in. Your address is not stored with those settings; it is read from your account at the moment a mail is composed. The site checks each morning at seven, Swiss time, and sends you something only when enough time has passed since your last mail and something new has been published — so daily, weekly or monthly is your choice, not the schedule’s. The mail carries the titles and the links and nothing else, never a summary, and each one is kept in full — the address it went to, the subject and the text — for thirty days after it is sent, so a delivery that failed can be retried and diagnosed; after thirty days that copy is deleted automatically. Switching the mail off stops it at once, from the link in any mail or from the switch in your settings, and subscribing again makes a fresh consent with a fresh token that retires the links in older mails. The record that you once consented is kept rather than deleted, because that record is the proof the mail was asked for — and it is why an old unsubscribe link still gets a calm answer instead of an error, even though it no longer switches anything off.
Analytics
Analytics runs only if you choose Accept in the cookie banner, and declining changes nothing else on the site. It is Google Analytics, provided by Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland. Once you accept, your browser loads Google’s script, which sets two cookies (_ga and _ga_ followed by this site’s ID) holding a random identifier for this browser that expire two years after your last visit, and sends Google: the address of each page you open and of the page you came from, both stripped of everything after the question mark except campaign tags (utm_…); how far you scroll and how long a page stays visible; when you choose a lens, or like, save or share an Insight; the address of any link to another website you follow; and what every browser sends anyway — IP address, browser, device type, screen size and language. Google derives an approximate location from the IP address and, by its own account, does not store the address itself. The site sends no name, no email address and no account identifier, and uses the data only for statistics about which pages are read — no advertising and no profiling across sites. The legal basis is your consent under Article 6(1)(a) of the GDPR. Google keeps the measurement data for fourteen months and then deletes it.
Your consent choice
Analytics is opt-in and nothing analytics-related runs until you choose Accept. Accept and Decline carry the same weight, nothing is pre-selected, and declining costs you nothing on this site. Your answer is kept in this browser only, which makes it a per-browser answer rather than a per-person one: a second device asks again. You can change it at any time through “Cookie settings” in the footer, reachable on every page, and withdrawing is exactly as easy as giving it.
Who else is involved
Besides the operator, a few service providers are involved, and none of them is an advertiser. A hosting provider runs the site, the sign-in service, your account and its database on servers in Germany. An email delivery service sends the mails: the sign-in service’s mails that confirm your address or reset your password, and the email about new Insights if you subscribed to it. A domain provider holds the domain name and forwards replies to the address the mails come from. Google receives the analytics data described above, and only if you accepted it. The email delivery service, the domain provider and Google are based in the United States and may process data there; all three are certified under the EU–U.S. and Swiss–U.S. Data Privacy Framework, which is the safeguard for that transfer. Nothing else is embedded in these pages: no advertising network, no social widget, no third-party font, no comment platform — and no script you have not accepted.
How long things are kept
Only one thing your account holds is deleted on a schedule: the stored copy of a mail that was sent to you, thirty days after it settles. Database backups are kept for seven days and then overwritten. Everything else your account holds stays until you take it away — a like until you unlike it, a save until you unsave it, a preference until you change it, an account until you ask for it to be deleted — and unliking, unsaving and clearing a preference really do remove the record rather than mark it as gone. Withdrawing from the email is the exception and keeps its record on purpose, for the reason in the section above. If a further expiry schedule is ever introduced, this paragraph will say what it is. The cookies expire on their own anyway — the sign-in cookie thirty days after your last visit, the sign-in flow cookies after ten minutes — and everything kept in this browser goes when you clear your browser data.
Your rights
You have the right of access, correction, deletion, restriction, objection and portability under the GDPR and the equivalent rights under the Swiss FADP, and where something rests on your consent you can withdraw it at any time with effect from then on. Two withdrawals you can make yourself, immediately: the email switch in your settings ends the email, and “Cookie settings” in the footer takes back the analytics consent. For everything else — a copy of what is stored about you, a correction, or deleting your account outright — write to peter@peterengineers.ai. There is no self-service delete on the site; a person does it, and you get an answer within a month. If you think your data has been handled wrongly and the answer you get does not settle it, you can take it to a supervisory authority — the FDPIC in Switzerland, or the data protection authority where you live in the EU.