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.

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 analytics script is loaded at all, and the site behaves exactly as it does for anyone who accepted. Because a meaningful share of readers decline, our own audience figures are known to be lower than real traffic; we treat that gap as expected rather than as something to correct.

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.