Privacy

The short version

• Reading the site sets no cookies. We count visits in totals and cannot see who you are.
• Subscribing sends your email address to Beehiiv, the service that sends the email, and to nobody else.
• Beehiiv records whether you open an email and which links you click.
• Every email carries an unsubscribe link that works in one click. To have your record deleted, write to us.
• We do not sell your address.

Who is responsible

Dhruv Shekhawat, Dauerwaldweg 1, 14055 Berlin, Germany, is the controller for everything described here. He writes and publishes Psychedelic Brief and is the person to write to about your data: dhruv@psychedelicbrief.com. The same details are on the imprint.

Reading the site

The site is a set of fixed pages hosted by Vercel. To deliver a page, Vercel's servers receive your request, which carries your IP address and the address of the page you asked for, as any web server must.

Fonts are served from this site, not from Google or any other font host. A page here makes no request to any server other than the one that served it, with one exception, the bot check on the subscribe form, described below.

We measure traffic with Vercel Web Analytics. Its script is served from this site's own address and reports back to it. It sets no cookies. What we see is a dashboard of totals: visitors and page views, which pages were read, which sites sent the visitors, which countries they were in, and what kind of device and operating system they used. It shows us no individual visitor. Vercel's documentation for this product says a visitor is identified by a hash made from the incoming request rather than by a cookie, that the session that hash belongs to is discarded after 24 hours, and that what may be stored with each data point is the time, the page address, the referring site, filtered query parameters, an approximate location, and the browser, device type and operating system.

On the Allocate game, a vote and the coins you place are stored only as totals, with no cookie and nothing that identifies you; to stop repeat submissions we keep a salted, one-way hash of your IP address and the date for 24 hours, then it is deleted.

Subscribing

The subscribe form posts to our own small program running on Vercel, not to Beehiiv directly. That is deliberate: the key that lets us add subscribers at Beehiiv never reaches your browser.

What the form sends to that program:

• Your email address.
• Which form you used. Each form on the site has a short name, such as hero or footer, so we can learn which placement readers actually use.
• The address of the page you were on.
• The time the page loaded, so a submit that arrives faster than anyone can type is treated as a bot.
• A hidden field that no reader sees or fills in. Bots fill in every field, so a value there marks the submit as a bot.

A submit that trips either bot test gets the normal "check your inbox" reply and goes nowhere. For everyone else, the program checks that the address looks like an address and sends Beehiiv four things: your address, the name of this site as the source, the form name, and the page path. Beehiiv also records this site as the referring site. The program writes nothing about you to its logs: not your address, and not Beehiiv's reply, which can echo it.

Beehiiv then creates a pending subscription and sends you one confirmation email. Nothing else is sent until you click the link in it. This confirmation step has been on since 2 October 2026.

The bot check

The form can carry a bot check from Cloudflare, called Turnstile. It is present only when we switch it on. When it is on, the page loads one script from challenges.cloudflare.com, the single request a page on this site makes to another company's server, and our program passes the token the check produced to Cloudflare to verify it, and nothing else: not your IP address, not your email address. Cloudflare's notice for Turnstile says the check reads a set of signals from your browser, naming your IP address, a TLS fingerprint, your user agent string, and the site key and the address it is used on.

The email

Beehiiv sends every issue from our account and holds the subscriber list. For each email it records whether it was opened and which links in it were clicked. We see those figures per issue: how many readers opened it, how many clicked, how many unsubscribed. We use them to learn whether an issue was read.

Beehiiv counts clicks per link, and it adds a tag to every link naming our Beehiiv address as the source, so the site you land on can see the visit came from our email. Images in the email load from Beehiiv's servers when your mail client displays them.

The unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email is Beehiiv's and works in one click.

Who handles your data

Three companies process data on our behalf. Your address goes to no one beyond them.

• beehiiv Inc., 228 Park Avenue # 2329976, New York, NY 10003: the subscriber list, the sending of every email, and the open and click record.Privacy policy,data protection addendum.
• Vercel Inc., 440 N Barranca Avenue #4133, Covina, CA 91723, United States: hosting the site, running the subscribe program, and the traffic figures.Privacy policy,data processing addendum.
• Cloudflare, Inc., 101 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA: the bot check on the form, when it is on.Privacy notice for Turnstile,data processing addendum.

All three are United States companies. Beehiiv and Vercel each state that where personal data crosses a border they rely on standard contractual clauses approved for that purpose.

How long we keep it

• Your subscription record stays at Beehiiv for as long as you are subscribed.
• Traffic figures: the hash that stands in for a visitor is discarded after 24 hours.

Unsubscribing and deletion

To stop the email, click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any issue. That is the whole process.

To have your record deleted rather than marked unsubscribed, write todhruv@psychedelicbrief.com from the address you subscribed with, and it is removed from Beehiiv. The same address answers any question about what we hold on you.

Your rights

The General Data Protection Regulation applies to everything on this page. You can ask what we hold on you, have it corrected or deleted, have its use restricted, object to it, take a copy of it with you, and withdraw a consent you gave, such as your subscription, at any time. Write to the address above for any of these. If you think we have handled your data wrongly, you can complain to a data protection authority; for Berlin that is the Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit.

Changes to this page

When what we do changes, this page changes with it, and the date here moves. Last changed on 4 October 2026.