Privacy Notice
Effective Date: April 29, 2026
Last Updated: May 3, 2026 (grudgingly adding the new Cookie section below, and the * under the What I Do Not Do Section)
Congratulations on clicking a Privacy Notice. In my experience, the only people who read these all the way through are plaintiffs' lawyers, overzealous regulators, nerds, and the occasional law student avoiding a more difficult assignment. If you are one of those people: hello, I am one of you.
I am a privacy lawyer. I have written a great many of these notices for a great many companies, and I have spent most of my career explaining to clients why the document they want to be three sentences long has to be eleven pages instead. This is the privacy notice I have always wanted to write. It is shorter than most. It is also, I hope, clearer than most.
Who I am
This is the personal author website of Kathryne M. Morris ("Kate," "I," or "me"). I use this site to share information about my book, Not Built for You, and occasional related writing. I am not running a business through this site. I am not running an ad network. I am one person with a book (in progress) and a domain name.
If you would like to reach me about this notice or about anything else, you can email me at katesbook@proton.me.
What this site is built on, and what that means
This site is hosted on Squarespace. Like most authors, I rely on a platform to host my content, and Squarespace handles the back end. That arrangement comes with a few honest caveats:
Squarespace collects certain technical information automatically when you visit any site it hosts — things like IP address, browser type, device characteristics, pages viewed, and approximate location derived from your IP. I do not control what Squarespace collects at the platform layer, and I do not receive most of it in any individually identifiable form.
Squarespace sets cookies and similar technologies on its hosted sites. Some are strictly necessary for the site to function. Others support analytics. I have restricted cookies and similar technologies by toggling the toggles that Squarespace offers me. I’ve also enabled the cookie banner at the bottom of this site, so that you can manage the cookies this site sets. You can also do this through your browser settings.
For the full picture of what Squarespace does with information collected through sites it hosts, please see Squarespace's own Privacy Policy at https://www.squarespace.com/privacy.
I am not trying to pass the buck. I am telling you the truth about how a site like this actually works.
What I intentionally collect
Almost nothing. Specifically:
If you email me, I will have your email address and whatever you decide to put in the email. I will use it to reply to you, and I will keep your message for a reasonable period in the way any human keeps emails. I will not add you to a mailing list because you wrote to me.
If you buy the book (assuming it ever goes on sale), you will most likely be doing so through a third-party retailer because that’s how the selling of books works. Those retailers handle the transaction and your payment information under their own privacy policies. I will never see your payment details.
That is, more or less, the entire scope of what I am affirmatively trying to collect through this site.
What I do not do
In the spirit of telling you what is not happening, which is often more useful than telling you what is:
I do not sell your personal information. I never have. I have no infrastructure to do so, even if I wanted to, which I do not.
I do not "share" your personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising (the technical phrase that California uses for what most people call targeted advertising). I do not run ads on this site.
I do not use your personal information to make significant decisions about you, profile you, or infer sensitive characteristics. I am writing a book. That is the extent of the operation.
I do not knowingly collect information from children under 17. This site is not directed to children. If you are a child, you should be doing something more active than reading a privacy notice.
*Again, I am just person with a website, and things happen on the backend of this website that I cannot control, even though I try.
A specific note about AI training
Given the subject of the book, this seems worth saying plainly. I do not consent to the scraping, copying, ingestion, or other use of any content on this site — including the text of this notice, my writing, my book excerpts, or any information you submit to me — for the purpose of training, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmenting, or otherwise developing third-party generative AI systems. Reservation of rights is hereby asserted under applicable law.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have rights under laws like the GDPR, the UK GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act (as amended by the CPRA), the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act, and similar laws in Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and a growing number of other jurisdictions. Those rights typically include the right to:
know what personal information is held about you,
access or receive a copy of that information,
correct inaccuracies,
request deletion,
opt out of certain uses (sale, sharing for targeted advertising, profiling), and
not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights.
Given how little personal information I actually have about you, exercising most of these rights will be a quick exchange of email. To make a request, write to katesbook@proton.meand tell me what you want. I will respond within the time required by the law that applies to you. If I cannot verify that you are who you say you are, I may have to ask follow-up questions before acting on the request — not to be difficult, but because handing over information to the wrong person is itself a privacy harm.
If you are in the EU, the UK, or another jurisdiction with a supervisory authority, you also have the right to complain to that authority. I would prefer you talk to me first.
Use of Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies
I don’t want non-essential cookies or other tracking technologies on this website, but I just scanned the website and new cookies have appeared – This is what happens when you rely on a platform.
So it seems this website may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website – when visited by a user – places on the user’s device to remember information about the user, such as the user’s language preference or login information. This type of cookie is set by this website and is referred to as a “first-party cookies.” This website uses first-party cookies primarily to make the website work as you expect it to. For example, it uses the information we collect through first-party cookies to allow you to navigate between pages efficiently, analyze how well the website is performing, and understand the content that you spend the most time reviewing.
In some cases, the website may use first-party cookies to store information for targeted advertising. I am telling you this because it is true. But I not doing this. I have no control over it, or otherwise the control that I may have is so buried on the platform that I can’t find it. The website may also incorporate cookies and similar technologies, such as pixels, tags, and web beacons, from outside the website’s domain (“third-party cookies”). Third-party cookies gather information to enable vendors to provide a range of services including targeted advertising and measuring the success of advertising campaigns. But again, I am not intentionally setting these cookies. I do not want them. Below is a list of the categories of first- and third-party cookies that I have found on this website. You can prevent the collection of data by non-essential performance, functional, and marketing cookies by clicking on the cookie banner at the bottom of this website and declining the non-essential cookies. I encourage you to do that (and to add a cookie suppression tool to your browser – See my Tech Tips).
How Cookies Appear to Be Used
In scanning the website, I have deciphered that cookies appear under the following circumstances and for the following reasons:
Enabling you to use some of the website’s features
Identifying if you have accepted the use of cookies on the website
Compiling data about website traffic
Tracking your browsing habits to enable to show you advertising by Google (not by me)
For information on some of the cookies that appear on the website, please review the policies from some of the website’s vendors:
Cookie Management
You can control and manage cookies associated with your browser. If you are interested in controlling and managing cookies from your browser including any set by the website, please refer to http://www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/index.html for information on different ways to configure your browser’s cookie settings. If you want to clear all cookies left behind by the websites you have visited, here are links where you can download three third party programs that clean out tracking cookies. https://www.adaware.com/ad-blocker/http://www.spybot.info/en/download/index.htmlhttp://www.webroot.com/consumer/products/spysweeper/
You may delete cookies from your web browser at any time or block cookies on your equipment, but this may affect the functioning of or even block the website. You can prevent saving of cookies (disable and delete them) by changing your browser settings accordingly at any time. It is possible that some functions will not be available on our website when use of cookies is deactivated. Check the settings of your browser. Below you can find some guidance:
Mozilla
You can adjust your advertising preferences on mobile devices through your device settings. Below you can find some guidance based on your type of mobile device:
Android
DAA Many advertising companies that collect information for interest-based advertising are members of the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) which maintains self-regulatory programs along with websites where people can opt out of interest-based advertising from their members. To opt-out of website interest-based advertising visit the DAA’s opt-out portal available at http://optout.aboutads.info/.
To opt-out of data collection for interest-based advertising across mobile applications by participating companies, download the DAA’s AppChoices mobile application opt-out offering found here: https://youradchoices.com/appchoices.
Non-Participant Opt-Out Options Some of vendors do not participate in the DAA self-regulatory program for online behavioral advertising or have developed their own processes for allowing consumers to opt-out: https://branch.app.link/optoutSome devices and apps do not have access to web-based browser cookie opt-outs. To learn more about the advertising opt-outs provided by your mobile device’s operating system (like iOS and Android) or the device manufacture, click here.
Changes
If I make material changes to this notice, I will update the "Last updated" date at the top and, where appropriate, post a more prominent notice on the site. The current version is always the one you are reading.
Contact
Feel free to contact me with any questions, though relevant questions are preferred:
Kathryne M. Morris at katesbook@proton.me.
Thank you for reading.