Privacy
What happens to what you type here
This page says what this site asks you for, who else sees it, where it goes, how long it is kept, and how to have it back or deleted. It describes this site only, and every line of it is something you can hold me to. Last updated 10 November 2026.
What this site collects
There are three forms on this site, and they are the only places it asks you for anything.
If you send me a message
The contact form asks for your name, your email address and your message. All three are needed, because without them there is nothing to answer.
If you enquire about a retreat or a session
The enquiry form asks for your name, your email address and what you are looking for — a meditation session, spiritual guidance, or addictions recovery.
You can also tell me how many sessions you have in mind, something about any practice you have now or have had before, and anything else you would like to say. Those are optional. Leave them empty and the form still sends.
If you join the newsletter
The sign-up asks for your email address. That is all it asks for, and all it sends.
Those three lists are complete. Nothing is collected behind your back, nothing is guessed about you from what you wrote, and there is no field you cannot see.
What you tell me about recovery, and about practice
Two of the answers on the enquiry form are more sensitive than the rest, and they deserve naming rather than being quietly lumped in with your email address.
Addictions recovery is one of the three things that form offers. Choosing it tells me something about your health. The practice question tells me something about your beliefs. In UK and European law both belong to a special category that needs more than the ordinary reason for holding it — it needs your explicit consent, which is what sending that form, having read this page, is.
They are there so that I can answer you usefully, and for nothing else. They are not shared, not used to sort you into any group, and nobody reads them but me — passing, on the way, only through the companies listed further down.
If you would rather not say, the practice question is optional and can stay empty, and "something I would rather explain in person" is a complete answer to the rest.
The one thing it keeps that you did not type
When you send any of the three forms, the handler has to be able to tell one sender from another, so that nobody can flood it with thousands of submissions. It does that without keeping your address.
Your IP address is mixed with a secret held on the server, and the result is put through a one-way hash: a short string of letters and numbers that cannot be turned back into the address it came from. Only that string is stored. Your IP address is not stored, and nothing of the kind is saved beside your message.
Those strings are deleted after 24 hours.
Cloudflare, which serves these pages, keeps its own short-lived records of requests to the site, as any host does. Those records belong to Cloudflare and are not part of what this site stores.
What you are agreeing to, and why I may hold it
A message or an enquiry
You are asking me to come back to you, so I use what you sent to do exactly that. Nothing else. It is not sold, not swapped, not used to advertise anything, and not passed to anyone outside the list below.
The legal name for that reason is legitimate interests — you wrote to me, and answering you is the obvious use of what you wrote. For the sensitive answers above it is your explicit consent instead, because the law asks for more there, and rightly.
The opt-in box on the enquiry form
There is one tick box, at the foot of the retreat and session enquiry form, and it asks whether you would like the occasional email about retreats, events and new writing.
It starts unticked. You never have to tick it, and the form sends either way — it is an invitation, not a condition. Sending the enquiry does not add you to the newsletter or to any other list. Ticking that box is the only thing that does, and then it really does: your address goes onto the same list the sign-up form uses, with the same confirmation email and the same unsubscribe link, and nothing about your enquiry goes with it.
The newsletter sign-up
There is no tick box on the sign-up, because that form does one thing: it joins you to the list. Sending it is your consent, and the line under the button says what you are agreeing to receive.
Mailchimp then emails you and asks you to confirm. Until you click the link in that email you are not on the list, and nothing else is sent to you. Every newsletter after that carries an unsubscribe link, and one click is enough.
One exception, and it is Mailchimp's rule rather than my choice: if you have unsubscribed from this list before, or asked to be forgotten from it, Mailchimp will not put you back on from a form. No confirmation email arrives and nothing is added. That applies to the tick box above as well as to the sign-up. If you meant to come back, write to me and I will sort it out.
Consent is the reason for anything to do with the newsletter, and you can take it back whenever you like, without explaining. Taking it back stops what comes next; it cannot unsend what has already gone.
Who else sees it
Six, counting my own mailbox, and each sees only the part it needs.
- Cloudflare hosts this site and runs the small handler the forms post to. Your submission is stored in a Cloudflare database on my own account, not with a form service.
- Resend carries the email that tells me a message or an enquiry has arrived. What you wrote passes through Resend on its way to my inbox, and Resend keeps its own record of having sent it.
- Mailchimp holds the newsletter list: your email address and the date you confirmed it. A sign-up is not emailed to me at all — there is nothing for me to do about it.
- My email provider holds my mailbox at becomingnobody.org, where the email about your message then sits, exactly like any other email you might send me.
- GitHub holds the site itself — these words and the pictures — and is how I sign in to edit them. Nothing you send through a form is kept there. It is on this list because my own browser talks to GitHub while I am editing, not because anything of yours does.
- Stripe would handle paying. There is no payment button on this site yet; when there is one, it will hand you over to Stripe's own page, you will type your card details there, never into this site, and this site will be told nothing about the payment.
Each of them has its own privacy policy: Cloudflare, Resend, Mailchimp, GitHub and Stripe.
And nobody else. No analytics company, no advertising network, no social-media tracker, no chat widget, no form service in between.
Where it goes in the world
This part matters if you are in the United Kingdom or the European Union.
The database is in eastern North America, which is where I am and where almost everyone who writes to me is. Resend, Mailchimp and GitHub are United States companies. Cloudflare is global and holds the rows in that region.
So if you write to me from the UK or the EU, what you send leaves your country and reaches the United States. There is no version of this site where it does not: the email telling me you wrote goes through a US company, and the newsletter list lives at one. Putting the database in Europe would not change that, and I would rather say so plainly than arrange something that looks like protection and is not.
What guards it on the way is those companies' own transfer terms, which their privacy policies above set out; I have no separate arrangement with any of them. What travels is small: your name, your email address, and what you chose to write.
How long any of it is kept
- Messages from the contact form, and retreat and session enquiries: 24 months. You may write about something that takes a year to come round, and I may need to look back at what we said.
- Newsletter sign-ups: 30 days in my own database, and then they are deleted. That copy is only a holding spot in case Mailchimp cannot be reached for a while. Mailchimp holds the real record of who agreed and when — whether you signed up or ticked the box on an enquiry — and that lasts until you unsubscribe.
- The scrambled string standing in for your address: 24 hours.
- The email in my inbox: as long as I keep it, like any other email. Ask, and I will delete it.
The first three happen on their own. A job runs once every day and deletes whatever is past its date, so none of it depends on me remembering.
Cookies, counting, and other websites
This site sets no cookies. Not one, on any page, including the editor I use myself. So there is no cookie banner here, and that is not an oversight: a banner exists to ask your permission for cookies and tracking, and there is nothing here to ask you about.
Nothing is stored in your browser on any page of this site you came here to read. No preferences, no identifier, nothing that would still be there tomorrow.
One address is not such a page: /admin, the editor I write these pages in. It is a tool rather than a page, and it holds things in the browser it is open in — editing preferences, and a copy of the site's words to show me. If you open it out of curiosity it will ask you to sign in and go no further, but before it asks you that it will have written one record of its own default settings into your browser, and asked GitHub's status page whether GitHub is working. Neither one carries anything about you, and clearing this site's data removes it. I would rather tell you that than call the address inert.
There is no analytics on this site. Visits are not counted in the page, the pages you read are not recorded, and no profile of you is built, bought or sold.
Every font, picture and script on the pages you read comes from this site itself. No video player, feed or map from another website is built into them, so nothing loads from anyone else's server while you read. The editor at /admin is the one exception, described above.
Some links do lead away — YouTube, TikTok, Amazon for the book, Stripe if you ever pay for something. Once you follow one you are on their site, under their rules and their cookies, and this page stops at that edge.
What you can ask for, and who is answering
What you can ask for
- A copy of whatever I hold about you
- A correction, if something is wrong
- Deletion: say the word and it goes — from the database, from Mailchimp, and from my inbox
- To come off the newsletter. The unsubscribe link in any email does it at once, or ask me and I will do it for you
- To take back your consent — for the newsletter, or for the sensitive answers further up
- To object to my holding it at all, or to ask me to keep it but not use it while something is being sorted out
- A copy you can take elsewhere: the answers you sent, in a file, rather than a description of them
Those last three have formal names, if you need them in a letter: withdrawing consent, objection and restriction, and portability.
How to ask
Use the contact form. No email address is printed anywhere on this site, so that harvesters do not find it, but that form reaches me.
I answer these myself rather than handing them to a department. Expect a few days; one month is the outside limit, and if something is going to take longer than that I will tell you inside the month and say why.
If you think I have got it wrong
Tell me first — it is one person and usually a short conversation. But you do not have to. In the UK you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, and elsewhere in Europe to your national data protection authority. Nothing on this page takes that away from you.
Children
This site is for adults. Nothing here is aimed at children, and I do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has sent me something, tell me and I will delete it.
Who is responsible
This site is mine — Alex Momcilovic, writing and teaching as Becoming Nobody. I decide what is collected, and I am the person to ask about it.
If this page changes
The date under the heading changes whenever these words do. If something substantial changes — another company in the list above, or a different period — it will be written here rather than quietly adjusted.