Privacy
We built this site to explain how attention is captured and exploited. It would be strange to exploit yours.
Most privacy policies exist to explain, in the most legible possible way, why a site is doing things you would object to if they were explained plainly. This one is different.
What happens when you visit
Cloudflare, the company that hosts this site, measures aggregate traffic — how many people visited a page, roughly where in the world they came from, what kind of device they used. We see "200 people in Germany read the page about attention economics today." We do not see you.
No cookies are set. No fingerprinting. No cross-site tracking. No profile is built. You are not followed across the web after you leave.
We chose Cloudflare Web Analytics specifically because it is cookieless by design. You do not need to consent to anything to use this site, because there is nothing to consent to.
If you subscribe to the newsletter
If you give us your email address, we store it with Buttondown — a small email platform — and use it only to send you updates. We will never give your address to anyone else, use it for advertising, or sell it. Every email contains a one-click unsubscribe. Email us to have your record deleted entirely.
Lawful basis: explicit consent — you opted in, you can opt out at any time.
If you donate
Payments are processed by Donorbox and Stripe. They handle the transaction. We never see your card number. We do receive your name, email address, donation amount, and date — and Dutch law requires us to keep financial records for seven years. We cannot delete them even if you ask; the law does not allow it. We say that plainly rather than hide it in a footnote.
We will not use your donor record to send you campaign emails unless you explicitly opted in when you donated. That opt-in is separate and optional.
Lawful basis: contract (processing your donation) and legal obligation (Dutch bookkeeping law, seven-year retention).
What we do not do
No advertising trackers. No Facebook Pixel. No Google Analytics. No LinkedIn Insight Tag. No behavioural profiling. No data sold or traded. No cookie consent banners — because there are no cookies to consent to.
We do not monetise your attention or your data. We are a foundation, not a business. Our only income is donations, which we disclose on the donate page.
The tools we use
| Tool | Purpose | Data sent | Their policy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pages | Hosting | Standard server logs, no personal data | cloudflare.com |
| Cloudflare Web Analytics | Traffic measurement | Cookieless, aggregate only | cloudflare.com |
| Buttondown | Newsletter | Email address (if you subscribe) | buttondown.email |
| Donorbox | Donations | Name, email, amount (if you donate) | donorbox.org |
| Stripe | Payment processing | Payment data (if you donate) | stripe.com |
That is the complete list. When it changes, this page changes.
Your rights
Under GDPR, you have the right to know what data we hold about you, to correct it, and in most cases to have it deleted. Email us at privacy@attentionmachine.org. We will respond within 30 days.
The exception: donation amounts and dates, which Dutch law requires us to keep for seven years. We can tell you exactly what we hold; we cannot delete the financial record itself within that period.
Who we are
The Attention Machine is operated by a Dutch foundation (stichting) in the process of registration. We will update this page with the registered name and KvK number when registration is confirmed.
Questions
If something on this page is unclear, email us. If you think we are doing something wrong, tell us. We would rather know.