One email address, and only if you offer it.

Occupation Road is written and run by Matthew Culnane, who is the data controller and the only person with access to any of this. The site collects one thing: an email address, and only if you type it into the subscribe box. Nothing else is asked for, and no attempt is made to work out who you are.

Subscriptions are handled by Buttondown, an American newsletter service, which holds the address and sends the essays. The basis is your consent — you give it by typing the address into the subscribe box, and you withdraw it with the unsubscribe link at the foot of every email, which works immediately and needs no explanation. The address is used for the essays and the notes and for nothing else. It is never sold, shared or passed on.

The site runs on Vercel, which keeps ordinary server logs of requests, as every web host does. The essays sit in a database that holds no reader data at all. There is no advertising, no tracking and no analytics. Nothing is stored in your browser unless you set it yourself: choosing Day or Night keeps that preference locally and sends it nowhere. Writing to the address below puts your email in an inbox, where it stays until it is dealt with.

You may ask what is held, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted, and the answer will come from the person who wrote the essays: editor@occupationroad.co.uk. If that is unsatisfactory, the Information Commissioner’s Office takes complaints.