Privacy policy

The Cold Standard is a free newsletter about the cold economy, published as developments land. This policy explains what we collect when you read it or subscribe, why we collect it, and what you can ask us to do with it.

• Your email address — only if you submit it, and only to send the editions you asked for.
• Where you signed up — a short tag such as home or an edition page, so we can tell which pages actually reach readers.
• Your reading region (lens) — optional, set by you at signup or in your lens settings, and used only to lead each edition with your region. We never infer your location.
• A truncated IP address — used only in memory, for a few seconds, to stop automated sign-up abuse. It is not stored with your subscription.
• Confirmation and unsubscribe state — whether you completed the double opt-in, and when you unsubscribed.

We do not run third-party analytics, advertising or tracking scripts on this site. There are no cookies used for advertising, and no profile of your reading behaviour is built.

We count page views with a first-party, cookieless beacon. It sets no cookies and stores no identifiers — only the page path, the referring host, and a daily-rotating hash that cannot be linked across days — and is used in aggregate only.

We send the newsletter because you asked us to, and we keep the record of that request so we can prove consent — the basis Canadian anti-spam law asks for. The check that stops automated sign-up abuse (rate limiting) relies on our legitimate interest in keeping the service working. For readers in the EEA or UK, the same two bases apply: performance of your request, and legitimate interests.

We use a small number of service providers to run the newsletter: Supabase (database), Resend (sending the emails), Netlify (hosting the website), and — for the optional paid tiers only — Stripe (payment processing; we never see or store your card details and hold only your email address and a Stripe customer reference). They process the data on our instructions. We do not sell your email address, and we do not share it with anyone else.

Your address stays on the list until you unsubscribe or ask to be removed, plus a short period afterwards so we can honour the request and keep a suppression record. If you never confirm your subscription, the pending request lapses and is cleaned up.

• Unsubscribe — every edition has a one-click unsubscribe link, and you can use the unsubscribe page.
• Ask us — for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it entirely. Write to us — reply to any Cold Standard email.

Access to the subscriber list is limited to what is needed to publish the newsletter. No system is perfect, so we cannot promise absolute security, and this newsletter is information — not legal, engineering or compliance advice.

If this policy changes in a way that affects you, we will note it in an edition rather than editing this page quietly.