Privacy policy

Emergent Life collects as little personal data as it can. This page says exactly what is collected, why, and how to have it removed.

What is collected

• Email address, only if you create an account for Emergent Life Lab. Nothing else is requested: no name, address, phone number, or date of birth.
• Account activity you generate: saved watchlist entries and saved controller snapshots, if you are signed in and choose to save them.
• Standard server logs (request time, path, and IP address) kept briefly for operating and securing the site, the same as almost any web server. Sign-in tokens and session identifiers are never written to these logs.
• Payment information: none, currently, because no payment provider is live. Once one is, card details will be handled entirely by that provider; this site will never see or store them.

Why

An email address is the entire mechanism Emergent Life Lab uses to sign you in: a one-time link is sent to it, and a server-side session is created once you use it. No password is ever created or stored, because none exists.

Cookies

Two cookies are set once you sign in: a session cookie (which keeps you signed in) and a matching security token used to confirm that actions you take really came from you. Both are strictly necessary for the account system to work and are not used for tracking or advertising. No cookie is set at all if you never sign in.

How long data is kept

Your account and anything you have saved are kept until you delete your account, or ask for it to be deleted. Server logs are kept only briefly for operational purposes.

Your rights

You can see everything associated with your account from your account page. You can delete your account, and everything saved under it, at any time from /account/delete. If you would like a copy of your data instead, or have any other request, email hello@emergentlife.co.uk.

Counting page views

This site counts how many times each page is served, so that decisions about what to write are based on what people actually read. It is done by this server, not by an analytics company, and it records only four things per page view: the date, the page address, the website you arrived from (its domain only, never the full link), and whether the request came from a desktop, tablet or phone.

Nothing identifies you, and nothing links two visits together. No cookie is set, your IP address is not stored or hashed, and no identifier of any kind is created, so there is no way for us - or anyone reading the data later - to tell whether two page views came from one person or two. That is why you are not being asked to accept anything: there is nothing personal to consent to.

The deliberate cost is that this cannot report visitor numbers, only page views, and it never will. Tools that report visitors derive an identifier from your IP address and browser; this does not, and adding it later would mean changing this paragraph first.

Third parties

Sending a sign-in link uses either the server's own log (in development) or a transactional email service (in production), which sees only your email address and the link itself, never anything else about your account. No advertising or tracking service is used, and no analytics company receives anything: the page counting described above happens entirely on this server.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, it will be updated here and, once accounts are billed, members will be told directly.