Privacy
This site uses no advertising or tracking cookies and no third-party trackers. Our own pages, fonts and scripts are served from followthegrift.com.
Visit counts
We count visits with GoatCounter, open-source analytics that we run on our own server. A small script, served from this site, tells our own GoatCounter server which page you opened, which site sent you, your browser, operating system, screen size and country. It sets no cookies, stores no IP addresses and does not follow you across pages or sites; GoatCounter keeps only aggregate numbers. Counting with a script rather than from server logs leaves out most automated traffic, which doesn't run scripts.
Server logs
Like any web server, ours records each request: your IP address, the page you asked for, the time and your browser's user-agent string. We use these logs to count visits as described above and to keep the site secure, and they are deleted automatically after 14 days. We don't combine them with anything else or sell them.
Security
We use CrowdSec to block abusive traffic such as vulnerability scanners and scrapers that ignore the rules. It looks at request patterns in the server logs. When an address is blocked for attacking the site, CrowdSec may share that address with its network so other sites can block it too. Ordinary visits are never shared.
The site is delivered through Cloudflare, which processes requests on our behalf to protect the site and speed it up. To tell people from automated bots, Cloudflare adds a small script to pages and may set one security cookie, __cf_bm, which expires after 30 minutes and is not used to track you. Cloudflare also asks browsers that support Network Error Logging to report failed connections to the site (for example a timeout or a certificate error) to Cloudflare, so outages can be spotted; such a report contains the page address, the type of error and your IP address, and nothing is sent when the site loads normally.
People covered on this site
The site processes information about public figures, drawn from public records and published reporting, for the purpose of journalism and public-interest commentary. We publish only information that bears on money flowing to people in public life, and we offer everyone covered a way to respond or request a correction.
Your rights
To ask a question about your data, or to exercise your rights under the GDPR, write to corrections@followthegrift.com.
Donations
We accept donations in Bitcoin on our support page. We don't ask for, and can't see, who donates: a Bitcoin payment shows us an address and an amount. Bitcoin transactions are public by design, and an exchange you send from may know your identity. The support page loads no third-party code.