Privacy Policy

Your account: your email address, a password (stored only in securely hashed form by our authentication provider), and the @handle you choose at signup — the name your comments appear under.

Membership and billing: payments are processed by Stripe. Your card number never touches our servers. We keep records of your plan, your payment history with Stripe reference IDs, and — if you purchase the lifetime membership, which includes a shipped package — the shipping name and address you give us.

What you do here: comments you post and reports you file; your video viewing progress, saved items, and likes (private to you); and any moderation history attached to your account.

Newsletter: if you subscribe, we store your email address for that purpose, send you a welcome email confirming the subscription, and give you the ability to unsubscribe at any time.

If you contact us: a message sent through the contact form is delivered to us as email — your name, address, and message go to the desk you choose and nowhere else. We keep the correspondence the way anyone keeps email; nothing from the form is stored on this site.

Technical: cookies that keep you signed in, and a cookie holding your shop cart’s id. Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs (including IP addresses). Sign-in forms use Cloudflare Turnstile for bot protection. The shop’s own pages, run for us by Fourthwall, set analytics and advertising cookies of their own — set out in the Cookie Policy.

If you buy from the shop: the shop is run for us by Fourthwall. You enter your name, delivery address and payment details on their checkout at shop.martinmediallc.com, and they hold that order. None of it reaches our servers: we never see card details, and we keep no record of what you bought. What passes through our servers is the cart itself — which products are in it, so the drawer can show it and price it. If you are a member, we pass a discount code to that checkout.

Product analytics: we use privacy-preserving analytics that collect no personal data and set no tracking cookies. We measure the site in aggregate — which pages and articles are read, where visitors come from, which sections are popular, and where people drop off on the way to joining (the steps from the pricing page to a completed checkout) — and never tie any of it to you as an identified member. Measurements are sent by a first-party beacon on our own domain (an endpoint under /_vercel/insights, operated by Vercel, our hosting provider): it sets no cookies, records no IP address against you, and counts visits with a short-lived hash that cannot follow you to other sites. Your viewing history, saved items, and likes are yours alone; analytics cannot see them and is not joined to them. We do not record session replays on our own pages, and do not capture keystrokes, mouse movements, or screens. The shop’s pages, run by Fourthwall, do record how they are used, through Microsoft Clarity.

Video playback is measured by Mux, who deliver our video: how long playback took to start, whether it stalled or failed. Mux receives your IP address and shortens it before storing. It stores nothing on your device, and it is never joined to your account.

Our own pages carry no third-party advertising networks. Ads on the free site are our own house ads, measured in aggregate with no personal identifiers attached. The shop’s pages run Google Ads conversion tracking, through the shop platform. We do not sell or share your personal information with anyone for their own use.

Comments are public — on free articles they are visible to everyone, signed with your @handle. Your handle is public by design; it is the identity you chose for exactly that purpose. Your email address, viewing history, saved items, and likes are never public. Reports you file are private and shared only with our moderators.

We use a small set of service providers to run the site: Stripe (payments), Supabase (database and sign-in), Vercel (hosting and the aggregate, non-personal analytics described above), Resend (transactional email), Mux (video delivery and playback measurement, which receives your IP address), Cloudflare (bot protection and network security), and Fourthwall (the shop: the storefront, checkout, orders and fulfilment). Through the shop’s pages, Google (analytics and advertising) and Microsoft (Clarity) also receive data about visits to them. Each receives only what its job requires.

You can delete your account yourself, from your account page, while signed in. It works exactly as the confirmation dialog says:

Right now — your account is deactivated and you’re signed out everywhere. For 30 days — sign back in to restore everything, no harm done. After 30 days — your profile and data are permanently erased.

Your membership stays active during those 30 days so that restoring brings everything back — which means you may be billed once more in that time. Any subscription is cancelled when the deletion becomes final.

What erasure covers: your email, sign-in credentials, handle, viewing history, saved items, and likes are permanently deleted. Your retired handle is never given to anyone else.

What survives, and why: comments you posted remain, with your name removed — they become an anonymous “Member,” because deleting them would erase other people’s conversations too. Financial records are kept for 180 days after erasure (long enough to handle payment disputes), with shipping addresses redacted, then removed. Where needed to enforce one-free-trial-per-person and to keep moderation bans effective, we retain a one-way cryptographic hash that cannot be reversed into your email address.

Privacy requests are made in-product, from your account while signed in — that is how we verify the request is really yours. We respond within 30 days. Deletion, a full data export (downloaded while signed in — never emailed), and correction requests are all available from your account page. An export contains your own data only: reports other members filed about you, and the identities of our staff who acted on your account, are not included.

This site is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information.

If our practices change, this page changes with them, with a new effective date. Continued use after a change means the updated policy applies.