What we keep, and where.

Who runs this site

Briefs (briefs.cloud and its subject sites, such as books.briefs.cloud) is run by Medusa Japan合同会社. For any question about your data, or to ask us to show, correct or delete it, write tohello@briefs.cloud.

What stays on your device

The site keeps a few settings in your browser's local storage. They never leave your device and we cannot see them. Clearing this site's data in your browser deletes them.

• briefs:analytics: your answer to the analytics question below (accept or decline).
• briefs:saved: the briefs you saved. They are kept under briefs.cloud, also when you save from a subject site, and they do not follow you to another device or browser.
• briefs:progress: where you stopped in a video, so you can resume it.
• briefs:theme and briefs:info: light or dark theme, and whether descriptions show.

Fonts and site search are served from our own server, so they tell no one else which page you read.

Google Analytics, only if you accept

We use Google Analytics 4 to count visits. It runs only after you press Accept. Before you answer, and after you press Decline, the site sends no request to Google Analytics.

When you accept, your browser loads Google's script from googletagmanager.com. It sends Google the pages you view, which subject site they are on, and the events Google Analytics records by itself, such as clicks on links to other sites. Google sets _ga cookies for briefs.cloud and its subject sites. Google's advertising features are switched off.

You can change your answer at any time with Analytics choice in the footer. If you decline after you accepted, the site deletes the _ga cookies it can reach and reloads the page without Google Analytics. Each subject site keeps its own answer, so a subject site you have not visited yet asks again.

Your email address, if you subscribe

The newsletter form on the home page is the only place the site asks for an email address. When you subscribe we store:

• your email address;
• the page you subscribed from;
• the status of the subscription (waiting for confirmation, confirmed, or unsubscribed);
• the time you subscribed, confirmed and unsubscribed;
• when we sent you a confirmation email;
• a random code that makes your confirm and unsubscribe links work.

The list is one file on our web server, in a folder outside the public website, so no web address can reach it. The emails go out through our own mail account.

Double opt-in. We send one email with a confirmation link. You are on the list only after you open that link. If you do not confirm within 7 days, the address is removed and the link stops working.

How to leave. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and your mail program can offer its own unsubscribe button. After you unsubscribe we send you nothing more. We keep the entry marked "unsubscribed" so the address is not mailed again; to have it deleted completely, write to hello@briefs.cloud.

To stop automated sign-ups, the server keeps a small file named after a one-way hash (SHA-256) of your IP address, holding the time of the last sign-up from it. It does not hold the IP address itself, and the next sign-up from the same address overwrites it.

"Spotted an error?" reports

The report form on a brief asks for no name and no email address. A report is your text (up to 2,000 characters), the title and address of the page, and the time. It is emailed to our editor, and a copy is written to a log file in the same private folder as the newsletter list.

The log has a size limit of about 1 MB. When it is full it becomes the previous log, and the log before that is deleted. So old reports disappear as new ones arrive; there is no fixed number of days.

One IP address may send five reports a day. To count them, the server keeps a small file named after a one-way hash (SHA-256) of your IP address, holding the times of your reports from the last 24 hours. Older times are removed when the file is next read. It does not hold the IP address itself.

YouTube videos

A brief shows our own still image in place of the video. Nothing is loaded from YouTube until you press play or a chapter. Then the player loads from youtube-nocookie.com, and from that moment YouTube (Google) receives your request under its own privacy policy.

The share menu and the source links are plain links. Nothing is sent to those sites until you click one.