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Nothing leaves

Every page of this site used to hand a third party the visitor’s address, through nothing more sinister than a font.

Third-party hosts contacted when loading a page. Before: two. After: none. BEFORE fonts.googleapis.com fonts.gstatic.com 2 hosts, on every page AFTER 0 hosts third-party hosts contacted when loading any page of this site
Figure 1 The right-hand column is empty. That emptiness is the entire claim, and it takes about ten seconds to verify in any browser’s developer tools.

The rule is short. What enters Neuraphic stays in Neuraphic. Nothing is sold, and no other company learns anything about a person because they visited us.

That is easy to write and easy to write falsely, so it is worth stating the version that can be checked: open any page, open the network panel, and count the hosts that are not ours. The number should be zero.

It was not zero

Until recently every page on this site fetched its typeface from a content delivery network. That is an ordinary thing to do; it is how most of the web loads fonts, and it is one line of markup.

It also meant that every visit to every page sent the visitor’s address, their browser, and the page they were reading to a third party, before a word had been rendered. No analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixel. A font.

The fonts are now served from this site. The list is empty.

Why the boundary is drawn at where data goes

A privacy commitment usually gets written as a promise about collection: we collect only what we need. That is a fine sentence and almost impossible to audit from outside.

The more useful boundary is about destination. Personalising something with what we already hold is one kind of act. Another company coming to know something about a person is a different kind, and only the second one is irreversible.

If advertising ever exists here it will follow the same line: recommendations drawn from what is already ours, and nothing that teaches an outside party who someone is.

What this does not fix

Declared boundaries and measured ones are different things. Every entry on the sub-processors page is a place data legitimately goes, and that list is a statement rather than a measurement.

The measurement above covers what a browser does on this site. It says nothing about what happens after someone signs in, which is a larger surface and deserves its own accounting.

Notes

1 Method. Six pages were loaded in a clean browser profile and every outbound request was recorded, grouped by hostname, discarding requests to this origin. Before the change the two font hosts appeared on all six. After it, no external host appeared on any.
2 Reproducing it. Open developer tools, select the network panel, reload, and sort by domain. This is the whole method; it needs no special access.
3 Scope. This covers the public site only. Signed-in surfaces are a separate system with a separate accounting, not covered here.