Privacy policy

Last updated: December 15, 2024

Please read this policy to understand what data I’m collecting and how I use it in accordance with the data protection laws (also known as GDPR) of the European Union.

If you use this site (laszlovad.com) and/or subscribe to my newsletter on extremelyunannoying.com, you accept this privacy policy.

1. Who am I?

My name is Laszlo Vad, and I am the sole proprietor of the laszlovad.com and extremelyunannoying.com websites.

You can reach me at hello@laszlovad.com or by physical mail at 1088 Budapest Vas u. 7. as. 2., Hungary.

2. What personal data am I collecting?

If you only use this site — laszlovad.com — I collect no personal data from you.

If you also subscribe to my newsletter through extremelyunannoying.com, I collect the following items:

Your email address, so I can send you the emails.
Your name, so you can comment under the individual newsletter issues using your own name.
Your profile picture, which is displayed next to the comments you make. This is only true if you have an avatar set up through Gravatar. My newsletter provider, Ghost automatically pulls that picture in, and unfortunately there is no way to control it — either by your or me — through Ghost itself. If you want to change or remove the image, you have to do it yourself through Gravatar.
Your expertise if you decide to add it when you make comments.
Comments you make under my newsletter issues.

Note that apart from your email address, the rest of the items only count as personal data if you include information in them that can be used to personally identify you.

3. What other, non-personal data do I track?

Open rates for my newsletter. The provider I’m using to send my emails, Ghost, embeds a small transparent image in every email. When you open the newsletter, this image gets downloaded, which sends a signal to Ghost that the email has been opened. I use this information to see how my subject lines are doing, and whether my emails are interesting enough to read.
Link clicks in my emails. Ghost tags each URL in the emails with a tracker that fires if the link has been clicked. I can see the overall number of link clicks and a breakdown of where those clicks occurred. Again, I’m using this data to figure out what content works for my audience and what doesn’t.
Feedback on individual newsletter issues. Each email comes with a thumbs up and a thumbs down button you can click to signal whether you liked the issue or not. This information is stored in Ghost and I can see a nice pie chart with the aggregated results.
I also collect basic website analytics like visits, page views, sources of traffic, etc. on laszlovad.com. I’m using this data to see how my site performs, what are my top articles, where the traffic comes from, and how big my audience is. I use Plausible Analytics to do all this in a privacy-first way. Plausible doesn’t cookie you, collect any of your personal information, or track you across sites. (If you’re interested in how they are doing web analytics in a totally privacy-first and GDPR-compliant way, you can read more here.)

It’s important to note that open rates, link clicks, and feedback values don’t just have an aggregate view in Ghost, but an individual one as well. I can see if you specifically opened a newsletter issue, clicked any links, and also the feedback you left. I’m generally not interested in the individual data, only the aggregate view, but you should know that it is there.

4. How do I protect your personal data?

I store your email address in Ghost—a digital publishing software developed and maintained by the non profit Ghost Foundation. Ghost is a respected company in the field that applies numerous security measures to keep your data safe. You can read more about their data protection practices on these pages:

As for myself, I am the only one with access to the Ghost dashboard, and I keep my login details in a secure password manager. I also rotate my password every 6 months.

Apart from Ghost, no.

I won’t sell or trade your personal information to anyone.

As mentioned above, I use Ghost to manage my email subscriber list, send emails to them, and chat with those subscribers in the comments on extremelyunannoying.com.

I outlined all of the data I personally control with the help of Ghost above. But, as you use the service to access my newsletter, they may process other personal data about you in some cases. This data is not shared with me. This can happen, for example, when you contact their customer support about something.

You can find Ghost’s full privacy policy at https://ghost.org/privacy/. When you subscribe to my newsletter, you agree to their policy as well.

6. How can you control your information?

You have a right to access the data I hold about you, request changes to it, or delete it altogether.

You can unsubscribe from the newsletter anytime by clicking on the unsubscribe link provided at the end of each newsletter.

You’re not going to get any more emails after that, but for some weird reason, Ghost will keep you around as an “unsubscribed member.” Unfortunately, there is no way to change this behavior, so as a workaround, I manually filter the subscriber list every month and fully delete users who have unsubscribed.

If you don’t want to wait for this process, you can email me at hello@laszlovad.com and request that I delete you from the Ghost database. My legal requirement under GDPR is to do so in 30 days, but I will try to get to it sooner.

Bottom line: if you want to exercise your rights over your data, shoot me an email and I’ll help you.

7. How long do I keep your data?

As long as you’re a subscriber of my newsletter.

Comments are a bit tricky. If I delete you from the Ghost database, your comments will remain, but the author will be changed to “Deleted User.” If you want to remove (some or all of) them, please do so manually before you unsubscribe from my newsletter. Or shoot me an email at hello@laszlovad.com, and I’ll delete all of them for you.

8. How will I notify you if this policy changes?

I’ll send you an email and give you an opportunity to review the revised policy before you choose to continue using my site and/or my newsletter.

9. What happens if there’s a data breach?

Ghost is required by law to notify me “without undue delay” if anything should happen to their operation. In turn, I’ll notify you by email within 72 hours (from the moment I became aware) or I’ll make a public announcement.

I’ll also alert the proper authorities. In my case, this is the Hungarian National Authority for Data Protection and Freedom of Information.

10. Where can you reach me if you have any questions about this privacy policy?

Via email at hello@laszlovad.com.