Privacy & AI

No ads, no cookies*, no Meta Pixel, no Google Analytics, no Substack spam, no tracking of any kind.

No need, turns out, for a privacy policy.

If you sign up for my mailing list, I will email you occasional updates sent directly from gwagner@columbia.edu.

These emails will always be free. Nobody else has access to the list. Nobody else is writing these updates. That also means no AI.

No AI

Nothing written on this site has been generated by AI.

If I put my name on it, I wrote it.

That includes all my social media posts, whether Bluesky, Mastodon, or LinkedIn.

I do work with plenty of co-authors. They all know about my no-AI policy.

And yes, AI has some uses for otherwise inconsequential tasks. Writing isn't one of them.

*No cookies and dark mode

The no-cookies policy, turns out, does come with some challenges. Take the dark-mode toggle on the top right of each page: Lots of people have preferences for dark versus light mode on websites. My preference is dark, and not (just) for climate reasons. I find it easier to read.

The toggle allows you to choose dark vs. light on each page. But if you have set a default on your browser, and you toggle away from that default, you would now see a small flash every time you navigate to a new page.

The smoothest fix: a cookie, because the website reads those on the server-side before loading the page. The user preference will have been accounted for, when the page loads.

To avoid having any cookies on my website, the only apparent way to avoid the small flash is to let the browser override your user setting each time.

You can choose to toggle away from your browser's settings on any given page. But when you navigate to another page on my site, the new page will be displayed reflecting your browser preferences.

Tradeoffs.

Of course, if you have a smart way to avoid that, please email web@gwagner.com.