Latest
finding the newest…
The List
New essays when they are finished. No schedule, no drip campaign, nothing sold.
Effective October 23, 2026
This is a personal site. It shows no ads and sells nothing about you. It does count visits and a few actions, so I can tell what people read and what brought them here. This page says exactly what is recorded and where it goes.
Erik Bethke, Austin, Texas. Contact: erik@erikbethke.com.
The site sends its own analytics events to Overwatch, the analytics service run by Bike4Mind, my company. These events are anonymous: none carries your name, your email address or your IP address, and they are not linked to a newsletter subscription.
A visit is recorded with the page you landed on, how you arrived (the referring site and page, without its query string, and any utm_ campaign tags on the link), and a rough channel such as search, social or direct. After that, a handful of actions are recorded: signing up for the newsletter (which form, not the address), clicking a highlighted link, following a link to a Bike4Mind product, sharing a post, opening a post, posting a comment, adding a reaction, unlocking a subscriber-only document, and an AI agent signing the guestbook.
The browser also keeps the landing page and referrer of your first visit in local storage (eb_first_touch) for up to 30 days. Its campaign tags and referrer are attached to the events your browser sends and to a newsletter sign-up, so I can see which post or campaign brought someone in. Raw events are kept for 90 days.
To count visits rather than page views, the site sets one first-party cookie, ow_sid. It holds a random identifier and nothing else. It expires 30 minutes after your last page view, so a return the next day is a new visit with a new identifier. It is HttpOnly (page scripts cannot read it), sent only to erikbethke.com, and never used to follow you to other sites.
Links to Bike4Mind products go through erikbethke.com/out/…, which records the click and then sends you on with campaign tags, so the product can see the visit came from here.
If you subscribe, the site stores your email address, when you signed up, your IP address and your browser's user-agent string, along with the first-visit landing page, referrer and campaign tags described above. The IP address and user-agent are kept with the subscription record to help spot abusive or automated sign-ups, and the rest tells me which writing brings readers to the list. The address is used only to send the newsletter and the subscriber links you ask for, and every issue carries an unsubscribe link. To have your record deleted, email me.
Comments and emoji reactions store a one-way hash of your IP address, not the address itself. It limits how often one address can post or react, and lets me count how many different people take part.
The site also runs Google Analytics 4, which sets its own cookies and sends page views and some of the same actions (newsletter sign-ups, shares, highlighted-link clicks) to Google. Google's handling of that data is described in its privacy policy. You can opt out with Google's browser add-on or by blocking its scripts.
Reading the site works with cookies blocked, local storage cleared or analytics scripts blocked; only the subscriber-only documents need their sign-in cookie. Blocking the ow_sid cookie means your page views are no longer grouped into one visit. Questions or deletion requests: erik@erikbethke.com.