Privacy policy

Every Mechanism publishes everymechanism.com, a public catalog of how things work, explained in 3D. You do not need an account to read it. This policy covers the public pages and the separate admin sign-in.

The site does not publish a postal address or a public email address. The practice described on this page is the notice of what a visit does.

Opening a page does not ask for your name, email address, or payment. The web server, and Cloudflare in front of it, record the ordinary details of a request:

• the IP address the request came from
• the date and time
• the page you requested
• the referring address, if your browser sends one
• the browser name and version, in the user-agent string

Those records are used to deliver the site, find faults, and block abuse. They are not sold, and this site does not keep a separate visitor database.

The public pages do not need a cookie to be read. Opening the admin sign-in, or signing in, sets a cookie named em_session. It keeps that browser signed in, is sent only to this site, is marked HttpOnly, and lasts up to seven days.

Cloudflare, which delivers the site, may set its own cookie to tell browsers apart from automated traffic. That cookie belongs to Cloudflare and is covered by Cloudflare’s privacy policy.

The admin password is stored only as a hash. Each sign-in attempt, successful or not, is recorded with the IP address and the time. Records older than two days are deleted. The admin pages are not part of the public catalog, and they are marked so search engines do not index them.

The pages load typefaces from Google Fonts. Your browser requests those files from Google, and Google receives the connection details of that request under Google’s privacy policy.

A topic page may include a video from the Every Mechanism channel. The player is loaded from YouTube. YouTube receives that request, and if you play the video YouTube may set cookies and receive what you watch, again under Google’s privacy policy. A page with no matching video does not load a player.

Every page loads a visit counter from Matomo at pase-analytics.com. Matomo receives the page you opened and may set its own cookie to recognise a returning browser, under the policy of that Matomo host. The same counter is included on pages added later.

The 3D models and pictures are files on this site. Reading a page does not send the model to another host. The requests that leave this site are the font files, a YouTube player when a page has one, Cloudflare’s delivery of the page, and the Matomo visit counter.

Connection logs are used to run the site and to protect it. The admin session is used only to keep the publisher signed in. Matomo is used to see which pages are read. The information is not sold, and this site does not build advertising profiles of its own.

Sign-in records are deleted after two days. The admin session cookie lasts up to seven days. Server and Cloudflare logs are kept for as long as those systems keep them for security and operation. There is no reader account and no profile stored beyond that.

The pages are written for a general audience. The site is not directed at children, and it does not knowingly collect personal information from them. There is no reader account to create.

You can refuse cookies and block third-party requests in your browser. Fonts, the video player, or the Matomo counter may then fail to load. The pages themselves still come from this site. Because the public site has no account and no visitor profile, there is nothing to access, correct, or delete beyond clearing your own browser.

When this practice changes, this page will be updated and the date at the top will change. The terms of service are a separate page and cover use of the site, not this collection of information.