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Privacy and measurement

WastedStars reads without accounts, without sign-in and without personalisation. Nothing you do here is tied to a profile, and the editorial pages are complete in the HTML the server sends: they do not need scripts to be readable. That is a design choice with a direct consequence for privacy — the parts of the site that inform you are the parts that observe you least.

Detailed audience measurement uses Google Analytics 4, and it loads only after you accept it. The choice is presented once, as a dialogue you answer before continuing; declining is a normal outcome and costs you nothing. If you decline, no Google Analytics script is loaded, nothing is stored on your device by it, and the site behaves exactly as it does for anyone who accepted. Because a meaningful share of readers decline, the Google Analytics figures are known to be lower than real traffic, and we never present them as the number of people who read the site.

Separately, and for everyone, the site keeps an anonymous count of page views operated by the company that hosts it. This one runs whether you accept the measurement above or not, and here is exactly what that means. It sets no cookie and stores nothing on your device. It does not identify you: visits are distinguished by a value computed from the request itself, which is discarded after twenty-four hours, so nothing links today’s visit to tomorrow’s. What it records is the page, where the visit came from, an approximate location no finer than a city, and the kind of device and browser. It cannot follow you to another site, and there is no profile behind it. We run it because without it the site would have no honest total at all — only the portion of readers who agreed to be measured in detail.

Independently of that choice, the site keeps a minimal record of how a visit started: the broad origin of the arrival and the entry path, held in the browser for the length of the session and never joined to an identifier. It exists so we can tell whether a page is found through search, through a link or directly, which is what tells us where to put editorial effort. It cannot follow you between sessions, between sites or between devices, and it is not sent to an advertising network.

The site does not sell data, does not run behavioural advertising, does not embed social trackers, and does not host third-party comment systems. Two service providers necessarily see technical request data in order to work at all: the hosting provider that serves the pages, and, only if you accepted, Google as the operator of the analytics service. Requests about the data held on you, corrections and rights questions go through the contact page, and we answer them there.