Privacy

Short version: Tessera is a static website. We do not run accounts, we do not run ads, we do not run a newsletter, and the data we get from you while you read is roughly the data your browser hands to any other site you open. The longer version follows.

What this site is, technically

Tessera is a static publication. Every page you load is a pre-built HTML file served from disk. There are no reader accounts, no logins, no cookies set by Tessera to track you, and no client-side scripts whose job is to identify you.

Connection data

When your browser asks for a page, our origin server records the request the way every web server has for thirty years: source IP, path, timestamp, user agent, response size. These logs exist for operational reasons — debugging, abuse detection, capacity planning — and rotate on a short cycle. They are not joined to any other dataset to identify you as a person.

The network in front of us

Tessera sits behind a CDN and DDoS-mitigation layer (Cloudflare). That layer necessarily sees the same connection metadata as our origin, because it is the thing your browser actually opens a socket to. It is configured to do its job — deliver pages, cache them, block obvious abuse — and nothing else.

Analytics

At present, Tessera runs no third-party analytics — no page counters, no heatmaps, no session recording. If we ever add a privacy-respecting aggregate counter (the kind that does not store per-reader identifiers), this section will name it and the date will move up.

Cookies and local storage

Tessera itself stores one thing in your browser: a single key recording whether you picked light or dark mode. It lives in localStorage on your device and is never sent anywhere. Cloudflare may set its own functional cookies for security and routing; those are not used for advertising and are not under our control beyond configuration.

Emailing us

If you write to [email protected] — with a tip, a correction, a pitch, anything — we keep the thread until it has run its course, then delete it. Writing to us does not subscribe you to anything, because there is nothing to subscribe to.

AI crawlers and training data

Tessera is published on the public web. We expect AI systems to crawl it, cite it, and quote it the way human readers do. Our machine-readable map and feed declare what Tessera is and how to reference it. If a piece is reused in a way that misrepresents the reporting, we will say so publicly.

Children

Tessera writes about technology for adults. We do not target the site at minors and do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16.

Your rights

You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Given that the answer is almost always “an email thread,” this is a short conversation. Write to [email protected].

Who is responsible

Tessera Press is the controller for the limited data described above. For any privacy question, the address is the same as everything else: [email protected].

Changes

Material changes show up here with a new “Last updated” date at the top.