What this site measures
Last updated: 10 August 2026
This is a personal site. It has no login, no shop and no newsletter — there is nothing here that collects your details unless you choose to email me or book a call. What it does have is analytics, and this page says exactly what that means, because a privacy policy that hides the interesting part is worthless.
Who is responsible
Joe Sturdy, Frome, Somerset, United Kingdom. The data controller is me personally, not any of my companies. Contact: [email protected].
If you contact me
Emailing me, or booking a call through Cal.com, sends me your name and email address so I can reply and put the meeting in a calendar. That is the whole purpose and I do not add you to any list. Lawful basis: legitimate interest in responding to someone who deliberately got in touch.
Analytics and cookies
Two tools run on this site, both loaded through Google Tag Manager. Both set cookies. Neither is necessary for the page to work.
- Google Analytics 4 — page views, how far you scroll, and which outbound links you click (LinkedIn, Instagram, my TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, GitHub, SoundCloud, Apple Music, the Sturdy Vanilla TikTok shop, Sturdy Ai, Askar Research, the booking link, WhatsApp, email and phone). Data is retained for 14 months.
- Microsoft Clarity — session replay and heatmaps: mouse movement, scrolling, clicks and navigation, so I can see which parts of the page lose people. Clarity masks anything typed into a form field by default.
Two things worth calling out specifically
Most privacy policies would bury these. They are the only parts of this setup that go beyond the ordinary, so they get their own heading.
- Approximate location, at postcode level. Cloudflare, which serves this site, works out an approximate location from your IP address at the edge. This site passes seven of those values into Analytics — city, region, country, postal code, latitude, longitude and timezone. That is more precise than the country-and-city figure Analytics gives on its own. It is derived from your IP, never from your device's GPS, it is approximate, and your IP address itself is not stored in Analytics.
- Google Signals is switched on. This lets Google associate a visit with a signed-in Google account that has Ads Personalisation enabled, which means visit data may contribute to Google's cross-device and advertising profiles. I do not run ads and I do not build remarketing audiences from this site — but the feature is on, so you should know.
Lawful basis for both: legitimate interest in understanding how a personal site is being read. Visits from my own devices and network are stripped out before they reach either tool, so the numbers reflect real readers rather than me testing the page.
How to opt out
Block or delete cookies in your browser, install Google's Analytics opt-out add-on, turn off Ads Personalisation in your Google account to disable the Signals behaviour, or read Microsoft's privacy statement for Clarity. None of it affects how the site works. A consent banner is on the way so this choice can be made on arrival; until then, the controls above are how you exercise it.
Who else sees the data
Google (Analytics and Tag Manager), Microsoft (Clarity), Cloudflare (hosting and the edge location lookup) and Cal.com (bookings only). Google and Microsoft process data outside the UK under their standard contractual clauses and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum. Nothing is sold, and there is no advertising network on this site.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of anything I hold on you, ask me to correct or delete it, or object to processing based on legitimate interest — email [email protected] and I will action it. You can also complain to the ICO at ico.org.uk.