Privacy: the one list the porch keeps

Reading is anonymous

Open any pattern, tick off rounds, print it for your own table, leave. None of that sends a name, an address or an account to anybody, because there are no accounts on StitchMood and no login. The site does not know who you are, and it is built so that it cannot find out.

The porch letter is the exception, and it is opt-in

If you fill in the letter box, Marlene keeps four things, and only because you typed them:

• the email address the letter goes to;
• your first name if you offered one, so the letter can open properly;
• which page you signed up from, as a short path like home-letter, so we know which boxes earn their place;
• the network address the sign-up came from, written once, as a tripwire against automated junk. Nobody builds anything from it and nobody looks at it again unless the form is being flooded.

The two extra boxes — how long you have been crocheting, and what you like to make — decide what gets written up next. They are not used for anything else.

Where it sits, who sees it, how long

The list is a single small database file on the same server that serves these pages, outside the public folder so it cannot be fetched over the web. It is not copied to a mailing platform, a spreadsheet or anybody's customer system. It exists for as long as the letter exists and you are on it, and then it does not.

It is never sold, lent, swapped or rented. If StitchMood ever changed hands, the list would travel only with this promise attached, or it would be deleted first.

Leaving, and seeing what is held

The bottom of every letter carries an unsubscribe link that works at once. If you would rather write, email hello@stitchmood.com and say so; Marlene deletes the row, confirms, and that is the end of it — normally within the week, always within thirty days. You can also ask to see what is held (it will be the four lines above with your answers in them) or to have something corrected. No reason is required, and asking does not start a “sorry to see you go” sequence, because there is no sequence.

Nothing is watching

On the date at the top of this page, StitchMood runs no analytics, no advertising tags, no social-media pixels, no heat maps and no session recordings. A page here loads its own words, its own photographs, its own stylesheet and scripts, and a typeface from Google Fonts. That is the whole list of requests, and you can watch it happen in your browser's developer tools.

It also means we cannot tell how many people read a pattern. The circle has decided it can live with that.

If that ever changes, you will read it here first

• This page is rewritten to name the exact service, and the date at the top moves.
• Any measurement would be anonymous and aggregated — page views, country, device type — and would never be tied to a name or to the letter list.
• Any advertising network would set its own cookies under its own policy, and what the site remembers would list each one by name, with the choice that goes with it.
• Any affiliate link is described on the affiliate disclosure. Such a link tells a shop you came from here; it tells us nothing about you.

Two things will not change under any version of this page: no personal information is ever sold, and no pattern is ever put behind an email box.

Letters you write to Marlene

Email, or the composer on the write-to-Marlene page, lands in an ordinary mailbox so it can be answered. The composer opens your own email program; this website receives nothing from it. Writing a letter never puts you on the porch-letter list.

Younger makers

Children are welcome on the porch and always have been, but the site is not aimed at anyone under sixteen, and it does not knowingly keep anything about them. If a child has put an address into the letter box, email hello@stitchmood.com and it is removed straight away, no questions and no confirmation hoop.

Your rights, wherever you sit

Under the UK and EU GDPR and under California's CCPA you may see, correct, delete and object to the use of what is held about you. StitchMood extends those rights to everybody, because running two standards over a list this short would be silly. The lawful basis for holding your address is the consent you gave by sending the form, and you may withdraw it whenever you like.

Changes

If anything on this page stops being true, the page is rewritten and the date at the top changes. There are no quiet edits on the porch.