Privacy Policy

Last updated: 17 August 2026

This site is run by one person in the United States. It publishes essays, correspondence and short notes, answers reader questions, and sells a small number of digital downloads. This page sets out exactly what data that involves, why, and what you can do about it. Where something is uncertain, it says so rather than reaching for reassuring language.

The short version

• The site does not run advertising, behavioural tracking, or third-party analytics.
• Comments are closed, so the site collects nothing from readers who are only reading.
• Three things collect data, and only when you choose to use them: Ask Lio, the newsletter, and the shop.
• Nothing collected here is sold, rented, or shared for anyone else’s marketing.

Who is responsible

liocai.com is operated by an individual publisher based in the United States. For the purposes of the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation, that individual is the data controller.

For anything on this page — a question, a correction, a request to see or delete your data — write to contact@liocai.com.

Ask Lio

If you send a question through the form on the Ask Lio page, the site stores:

• Your question. Held in a private queue. It is not published unless and until it is answered.
• The name you chose to publish it under, or “Anonymous” if you left the field blank. Use a real name only if you want a real name published.
• Your email address. Used once, to tell you if your question is answered. It is never displayed on the site, never attached to the published question, and never added to the newsletter or any other list.
• A one-way hash of your IP address, kept for up to one hour purely to limit how many questions can be sent from one place in quick succession. The address itself is not stored, and the hash cannot be turned back into it.

A human reads every submission before anything happens with it, to screen out spam and abuse. Questions that are not answered stay in the private queue or are deleted; they are not published.

The form uses no third-party CAPTCHA service, so nothing about your submission is sent to Google, Cloudflare, or anyone comparable. Automated submissions are filtered with checks that run entirely on this site.

To have a submitted question and its email address deleted, write to contact@liocai.com. If the question has already been published, the published text can be removed on request too.

The newsletter

If you subscribe, your email address is stored and used to send a periodic digest of new writing across the site. There is one list — subscribing means all four sections, not a choice between them.

The list is held by Hostinger Reach, an email service operated by Hostinger International, which also hosts this site. Your address is processed on their systems for the purpose of sending you the newsletter, and is not used for anything else.

Every issue carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes your address from the list. You can also ask for removal at contact@liocai.com.

The shop

The shop sells digital downloads and is built on WooCommerce. If you buy something, the site records your name, email address, billing details, order contents, and the IP address the order came from — the ordinary record of a sale, and in most cases something tax and accounting rules require be kept for several years.

Card details never reach this site. Payment is handled entirely by the payment provider you choose at checkout:

• PayPal — you are handed to PayPal, who process the payment under their own privacy policy.
• WooPayments — card payments processed by Automattic and Stripe under their own privacy policies.

Those providers return only what is needed to confirm the order was paid. Neither the full card number nor the security code is ever stored here.

Product reviews are switched off, so the shop collects nothing beyond what a purchase requires.

Comments

Comments are closed across the whole site, and no comment form is shown. If you are reading and not submitting anything, this site collects no personal data about you beyond the server logs described below. Avatars are disabled, so no email address — hashed or otherwise — is sent to Gravatar or Automattic.

Ask Lio exists precisely because it is a better-moderated channel than an open comment thread.

Hosting, server logs and caching

The site is hosted by Hostinger. Like any web server, theirs keeps access logs that include IP addresses, timestamps, requested pages and browser identifiers. These are ordinary security and operational records, kept by the host under their own retention policy. They are not used to build a profile of you and are not combined with anything else on this page.

A caching plugin, LiteSpeed Cache, stores copies of pages to make the site faster. It does not track individuals.

Outgoing email — Ask Lio notifications and shop receipts — is sent through Hostinger’s mail servers, which necessarily means the recipient address passes through them.

Cookies

The site sets as few cookies as it can:

• Shop cookies — WooCommerce sets cookies to remember your cart and your session while you are shopping. Without them a shop cannot function.
• Login cookies — only for the site’s own administrator, not for readers.

There are no advertising cookies, no tracking pixels, and no cross-site profiling. Because the site sets no non-essential cookies for ordinary readers, there is no consent banner to click past.

Embedded content from other sites

Articles may embed content — a video, a document, a post from elsewhere. Embedded content behaves exactly as if you had visited that other site: it can collect data about you, set its own cookies, and track your interaction with it, under its own privacy policy rather than this one.

How long things are kept

• Ask Lio submissions — kept while they are in the queue or published. Deleted on request.
• Newsletter subscriptions — kept until you unsubscribe.
• Orders — kept for as long as tax and accounting rules require, typically several years.
• Server logs — kept by the host on their schedule, not this site’s.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask what data this site holds about you, ask for a copy, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. Requests go to contact@liocai.com and are answered as promptly as one person reasonably can — within 30 days at the outside.

If you are in the UK or EU, the GDPR gives you those rights formally, plus the right to object to processing, the right to restrict it, the right to data portability, and the right to complain to your national data protection authority. The lawful bases relied on here are: your consent (newsletter, Ask Lio), performance of a contract (shop orders), and legitimate interests (keeping the site secure and working).

If you are in California or another US state with comparable law, you have equivalent rights of access and deletion, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them. This site does not sell or share personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of on that front.

Children

Nothing here is aimed at children under 13, and the site does not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has sent something through Ask Lio, write to contact@liocai.com and it will be deleted.

Security, honestly stated

The site runs over HTTPS, keeps its software updated, stores submitted email addresses in the site’s own database rather than anywhere public, and never handles card details. No website can promise perfect security, and this one does not. If a breach affects your data, you will be told.

Changes to this policy

If what the site collects changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top changes too. Substantial changes will be noted on the site rather than made quietly.