What this site measures
Short version: page views, how far you scrolled, and whether you clicked through to one of our apps. Nothing that identifies you.
Our own measurement
We record these events: a page view, article read depth (25/50/75/100%), an internal search term, a click on a source link, a click on a related article, and impressions and clicks on an Ali3N Studios app card.
Each event stores the path, the article, the referring site's domain, a coarse device type (mobile/tablet/desktop), and a visitor hash. That hash is a one-way digest of your IP address and user agent salted with the current date and a secret. It lets us count "how many people" rather than "how many page loads" within a single day, and it is useless for anything else — tomorrow the same visitor produces a completely different hash, and it can never be reversed into an IP address.
We do not set a tracking cookie for this. There is no cross-site tracking, no fingerprinting, no advertising network, and nothing is sold or shared.
Cookies
Two, both first-party and neither used for tracking:
ali3n-theme— actually browser local storage, not a cookie. Remembers whether you chose light or dark. Never leaves your browser.- An admin session cookie, set only if you log in to the backend. If you are reading the site, you do not have one.
Outbound links
Links to app stores and to our sources go through a redirect on this domain so we can count the click. The redirect sends no referrer to the destination, so the site you land on is not told which article you came from.
Retention
Raw events are deleted after 180 days. Only aggregate daily counts are kept beyond that, and those contain no visitor hashes.
The studio
This page covers /dev/ only. For Ali3N Studios apps and the wider
site, see the studio privacy policy.