What we do with your details

This notice covers the interest form and the emails that follow from it. It is written to be read rather than to be complied with, but it is also the notice required by UK data protection law, so it says everything it has to.

Who is asking

Rob Cowell, founder of Modern Wizardry, is the data controller — the person responsible for your details and the one to complain to. Modern Wizardry is not yet a company or a charity, so there is no organisation behind that: there is a person, and it is him. He can be reached at hello@modernwizardry.org, and will give a postal address on request.

What we collect

When you fill in the interest form, we record:

• your name and email address;
• your location, if you gave one, which is optional and is asked for at the level of a town or a country rather than an address;
• whether you registered as an Observer or a Member, and which of the ten domains you ticked;
• whatever you wrote in the open question, if you wrote anything;
• the date you signed up, and where you came from — a campaign tag in the link you followed, or the site that referred you, or “organic” if there was neither;
• your IP address at the moment you press Send, which is passed to Buttondown for its spam check and is not kept by us.

The second-to-last item is worked out by the form rather than asked of you. It records that you arrived from, say, LinkedIn. It does not record which post, who you are on it, or anything else about you.

The IP address deserves its own paragraph, because it is the one thing here we would rather not collect at all. Buttondown checks new subscribers to sort people from bots, and with no address to look at it judges the server that sent the request instead — which is shared with a great many unrelated projects, and had begun flagging real people as suspicious on the strength of the company they were unknowingly keeping. Yours is passed so that the check is about you. We never store it or see it again; Buttondown holds it on your record, and it goes when that record goes.

Why, and on what basis

We use your email address to send you occasional articles, developments and invitations about Modern Wizardry. The lawful basis is your consent: you tick a box that is never pre-ticked, and you are not added to anything until you click a confirmation link sent to the address you gave. Nobody can put you on this list but you.

We use the rest — location, domains, and what you wrote — to work out what to attempt first and where. Those answers are read by a person and shape the project. They are not used to profile you, score you, or decide anything about you automatically.

You can withdraw consent whenever you like. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and using it is final and immediate; you do not have to give a reason or reply to anybody.

Who else handles it

Three services process your details on our behalf, each under a contract that limits them to doing so for us:

• Buttondown holds the subscriber list, sends the confirmation email and handles unsubscribes. It is based in the United States, so your details are stored outside the UK under the safeguards in its data-processing terms.
• Resend sends us one summary a day of who has joined. Its European region is used, so that message is processed in the EU.
• Vercel hosts this site and keeps short-lived server logs, which record errors rather than visitors.

Nobody else sees any of it. Your details are not sold, not shared with advertisers, and not passed to anyone for their own purposes. The discussion list is a separate thing you join yourself, on Google’s terms rather than ours.

How long we keep it

• If you never confirm your address, the pending record is deleted after 90 days.
• If you confirm, we keep your details until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them.
• After you unsubscribe, Buttondown keeps your email address on a suppression list. That is the only way of guaranteeing we never email you again by accident, and it holds nothing else.
• The daily summary lands in our own inbox, so a copy of what you wrote sits there too. Those messages are deleted after twelve months.

One thing outlives the rest. When a record is deleted — by the 90-day rule above, or because you asked — we keep what you wrote in the open question, with your name and email address removed. Kept alongside it are the details that make an answer worth anything: your town or country, the domains you ticked, roughly when you wrote, and how you found us. We keep those for as long as the project runs, because working out what to build is slow and the earliest answers turn out to be the most useful ones.

Removing a name does not always make an answer anonymous, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise — some answers describe their author quite precisely. If you would rather yours went as well, say so and it will.

What you can ask for

Under UK GDPR you can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to restrict or stop using it, and ask for it in a portable form. You can also object to what we are doing with it. Write to hello@modernwizardry.org and you will get an answer within a month, usually a great deal sooner, because the list is currently small enough that this is not an administrative burden.

If you are unhappy with how that goes, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk. We would rather you told us first, but you are not obliged to.

Cookies and analytics

There are none. This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, carries no tracking pixels and loads nothing from a third party — the fonts are served from this domain along with everything else. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to, which remains the only good reason not to have one.

Changes

If this notice changes in a way that affects what we do with details already given, we will say so by email rather than quietly editing the page. Last updated 1 September 2026.