Privacy

We ask you for nothing but an address, and only if you want the weekly by email. We count how our pieces travel — pages opened, how far down you read, which link you left by — and nothing in that record is meant to identify you. Everything else that leaves your browser does so because of a third party we embed, and each one is named below.

You can sign in with a MiSFY account. Nothing on this site requires it, and we hold no account of our own — MiSFY does. Signing in tells us an account identifier meaningful only between our two systems, your display name, your account type and your country. We then read your public MiSFY profile, exactly as any reader of that profile could, for three more things we keep: your profile photo, your Instagram handle and the year you joined. We do not receive your email address, your real name or your phone number.

Those fields are stored in a cookie we set on this domain, signed so it cannot be edited, readable only by our server, and valid for 30 days; the profile half of it is re-read from MiSFY once a day so it does not go stale. Your account page shows more of that public profile — bio, genre, links, counts — but only while you have it open: none of it is stored here. Your photo is drawn straight from MiSFY's own image host, so no copy of it is kept here either. It is not used for advertising and it is not shared. Sign out deletes it. Ground Frequency and MiSFY are both operated by P.O.MFS, which is why this link exists at all — and it changes nothing about what we cover, per the editorial policy.

If you subscribe by email we keep the address and the day you confirmed it, in a Cloudflare key-value store, and use them for one message a week and nothing else. The address is never shared, never matched to the analytics below or to a MiSFY account, and never written into a page. Unsubscribing — one click in any message — deletes it at once; an address that never confirms is dropped after two days.

Delivery is by Amazon SES, which sees the address in order to deliver, and until groundfreq.com mail moves the messages are sent from our operator's domain, prideofmisfits.com.

We use Google Analytics to measure the site. It sets a cookie in your browser so a second page opened in the same visit is not counted as a second reader, and it records the page, the referrer, an approximate location from your IP address, and the sort of device you are on. We use it to see which reporting is read and which is not. We do not attach a name, an email address or an account to it, because we hold none.

In the EEA and the UK nothing loads until you say so. On a first visit from those regions the site asks, and no analytics request is made at all until you accept — declining is one click, the same size as accepting, and the site behaves exactly the same afterwards. We honour Global Privacy Control as a decline without asking. You can change your mind at any time through Cookie settings in the footer of any page.

Measurement is switched off entirely on our embeddable charts, which run inside other people's pages, and on unpublished drafts. Records are kept for 14 months and then deleted.

Pages other than our policy, methodology, corrections, privacy and data pages carry advertising served by Google, including through the AdSense programme. Google and its partners use cookies and similar identifiers to serve and measure ads, and in some cases to personalise them from your prior browsing. You can review and change that at My Ad Center, and read Google's own account at How Google uses information from sites that use our services.

Advertising has no bearing on what we cover. That is not a courtesy, it is the editorial policy — and it is why the pages you would use to check us, the methodology, the corrections log and the open data, carry no advertising at all.

Some pieces embed a video from the artist's own YouTube channel, served through youtube-nocookie.com; loading one contacts Google. Where we show a video still or a place photograph, the image is displayed from Google's servers rather than copied to ours, so that request reaches them too.

Typefaces are served by Google Fonts, which receives your IP address as part of any ordinary web request.

No newsletter list beyond the addresses above, no advertising profile built by us, no following you across other people's sites, and no sale of anything about you. We build no account of our own — the only sign-in here is the MiSFY one described above, and it is optional. Our own measurement stops at this domain. If you write to the desk we keep your message and nothing else.