Last updated: 3 August 2026
We collect as little as we can get away with, and this page says plainly what that is.
Pivotum is operated by Pivotum LLC, a limited liability company registered in the State of Delaware, USA. For any question about your data, email adam@pivotum.ai.
If you subscribe to the newsletter: your email address, and which page you subscribed from. That's it. We don't ask for your name, your child's age, or anything about your circumstances.
If you buy a publication: your email address and your payment details. Payment details go to Stripe and never touch our systems — we can see that a payment succeeded, not your card number.
If you just read the site: anonymous analytics about which pages are visited. Only if you consent, we also use behavioural analytics (Microsoft Clarity — anonymised heatmaps and session replays that show where the site confuses people) and advertising identifiers (the Meta pixel). See "Analytics, advertising and cookies" below.
We don't collect: names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, or any information about the young person a publication is being bought for.
We don't sell your data, and we don't share it with anyone except the service providers below, who process it on our behalf.
We use a small number of providers, each doing one job:
| Provider | What they handle | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Substack | Newsletter list and delivery | United States |
| Stripe | Payment processing | United States |
| Resend | Sending your purchase by email | United States |
| Vercel | Hosting, database and anonymous analytics | United States |
| Microsoft Clarity | Behavioural analytics (heatmaps, session replays), only with consent | United States |
| Meta | Advertising measurement, only with consent | United States |
Each has its own privacy policy. If you're in the UK or EU, transfers to the US are made under the standard contractual clauses or equivalent safeguards those providers maintain.
Two things run only with your consent. We advertise on Facebook and Instagram and would like to know whether it works, so we use the Meta pixel. And we'd like to see where the site confuses people, so we use Microsoft Clarity for anonymised heatmaps and session replays. Both are treated identically for consent — they load together, or not at all.
If you're in the EU, EEA, UK or Switzerland, we ask first. On your first visit we ask, and neither the pixel nor Clarity loads unless you accept. Decline and no advertising or behavioural data is collected. Clearing your cookies for the site prompts us to ask again.
Everywhere else, they load by default — and you can opt out. We honour your browser's Global Privacy Control ("Do Not Sell or Share My Data") setting, so if you switch it on, neither loads.
Either way, declining changes nothing about how the site works for you. Aside from the Meta pixel and Clarity described above, we use no other advertising or tracking cookies; anything remaining is strictly necessary — remembering your consent or region, and keeping a checkout session working.
Clarity's session replays are anonymised: they capture on-page interactions like clicks, scrolling and mouse movement, not the contents of anything you type. Nothing you enter — your email, your payment details — is recorded.
Newsletter subscribers: until you unsubscribe. There's a one-click link at the bottom of every email.
Purchase records: seven years, because tax rules require it.
Analytics: aggregated and anonymous, kept for two years.
Wherever you live, you can ask us to:
Email adam@pivotum.ai and we'll do it within 30 days. We won't ask why.
If you're in the UK or EU you have these rights under GDPR, and you can complain to your national data protection authority if we handle a request badly. If you're in California, you have equivalent rights under the CCPA, including the right to know what's been collected and to have it deleted. We don't sell personal information under any definition, in any jurisdiction.
Our publications are written for parents, and some of them are written to be read by teenagers. We don't knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16.
We don't ask for age, we don't market to minors, and we don't run advertising targeted at them. If you believe a child has given us their email address, tell us and we'll delete it immediately.
If we change this policy we'll update the date above. If the change is significant, we'll say so in the newsletter.
Questions, requests, or complaints: adam@pivotum.ai