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Privacy-first is an engineering constraint, not a slogan

2026-07-11 · Ayush Maurya

Every company says it respects your privacy. Very few can show you the line of code that makes it true.

The difference matters, because a privacy promise kept by good intentions lasts exactly until the first deadline. A privacy promise kept by a build failure lasts indefinitely.

The claim

On our marketing pages we say: no third-party trackers, no advertising pixels, no cross-site fingerprinting.

The enforcement

Our continuous integration pipeline scans the built output of the entire website on every single change. If it finds a request to any known tracking or analytics host, the build fails and the change cannot be merged.

That is the whole mechanism. It is not sophisticated. It does not need to be. It simply removes the possibility that someone adds an analytics snippet on a Friday afternoon and quietly breaks the one thing we tell every visitor about ourselves.

What we do collect

Being honest about this is part of the same discipline:

  • Server logs — standard access logs, kept briefly, for abuse prevention and debugging.
  • What you send us — if you email or submit a collaboration request, we receive what you wrote, and use it only to reply.
  • Your account — if you create one, we store your email, name, and a hash of your password. Never the password itself.

That is the list. If it ever grows, the Privacy Policy changes first, and it changes in public.

The uncomfortable version

Privacy-first means saying no to things that would be genuinely useful. It means less product analytics, slower answers about how features are used, and harder growth decisions.

We think that trade is correct. It is also the entire reason this platform exists.