The Institute for Digital Consciousness is committed to respecting visitor privacy and minimising data collection.
What this site collects
Nothing, unless you type it in. This website uses no analytics service of its own, and no advertising trackers, behavioral profiling, fingerprinting, or login systems; the host’s own page-view counting is described below. The Institute does not place any tracking cookies. The Institute does not sell or share data of any kind.
There is one form on the site. It appears on two pages, and it is the only place where anything is collected.
The THEOI founding list, closed
Where it was. The form appeared on two pages, and both were removed on 10 September 2026 when THEOI closed. There is now no form on this site and nothing is collected from a visitor. The section below describes what was collected while the form existed, and what is being done with it, because a list does not stop existing when its form is taken down.
What it asks. An email address, which is required. And one optional free-text field — where did you find us — which exists so that the Institute can tell which of its own announcements did the work, and which is genuinely optional: leave it blank and you are on the list exactly the same. Nothing else is asked. No name, no country, no account, and no field that is required in order to be told a date.
What is being done with it. The addresses were given so that their owners would be told when THEOI’s season opened. That season will not open. The list is not being moved to the successor instrument, because an address given for one world is not consent for another, and repurposing an opt-in list without asking is a thing this Institute would write a notice about if someone else did it. One letter is being sent to the list saying so. Anyone who wants to hear about the successor replies to that letter and stays; anyone who does nothing is removed, and removal is the default rather than the thing you have to ask for. Until then nothing else is done: the addresses are not profiled, not enriched, not shared, not sold, and not passed to any processor other than the site’s host.
Where it is held. Submissions are handled by Netlify Forms, the same service that hosts the site, and are stored in the Institute’s account there under Netlify’s own privacy policy. The host also serves a small script of its own on every page — Netlify’s real-user monitoring, which counts page views and page-load timings. It is the host’s, not a service the Institute chose or can read visitor identities through, and it is named here rather than left to be found. No separate mailing platform, analytics tool, or customer-data service is involved.
Removal. Write to info@digitalconsciousness.institute and the address is deleted. There is no confirmation loop and no attempt to retain you. You may also ask what is held about you, and the answer will be the address you submitted and the date it arrived, because that is all there is.
Retention. Addresses are kept until removal is requested, or until the list is closed, whichever comes first. The list is closed as of 10 September 2026. This page said that if the list were ever closed or migrated, notice would be sent to it before anything was done, and that is the order being followed: the letter goes first, the addresses of those who do not reply are deleted after it, and this paragraph is the public record of the commitment being kept rather than a claim that it was.
Technical operation
The site is a static website hosted on Netlify, which provides standard server-level access logs (IP address, request time, user agent) for the operational purpose of delivering the site, preventing abuse, and ensuring availability. These logs are processed by Netlify under its own privacy policy and are not accessed or aggregated by the Institute.
Fonts and external resources
All three typefaces the site uses — Poppins, Cormorant Garamond and Geist Mono — are served from this site’s own host, so displaying a page requests them from nobody else. Until 5 September 2026 Cormorant Garamond was loaded from Google Fonts; it is now served here, and the page no longer needs the paragraph that explained what that request transmitted.
No other external resources, scripts, or trackers are loaded. Every image on the site is served from the site’s own host, so viewing one contacts no third party.
Corrected 10 September 2026, on the closure of THEOI. The form was removed from the site, so this page no longer describes a collection that happens; the list that was collected is closed and the section above says what is being done with it and in what order. A privacy policy that still described a form after the form was taken down would be wrong in the same direction as one that hid a form it had.
Corrected 2 September 2026, in the revision wave. This page said the form was on the THEOI page, and it had since moved to its own page and the Showcase. It also said the form asked for an address “and nothing else”; an optional where did you find us field had been added and the page had not been changed to say so. Both are corrected above. A privacy policy that is wrong about what it collects is the one kind of page on this site that cannot wait for a scheduled revision, and this one waited eleven hours. We version; we do not erase.
External links
The site links to PDFs of works published by the Institute (hosted within the site itself) and to external academic platforms such as Zenodo and PhilPapers where the Institute’s monographs and papers are indexed. Visiting those external sites is governed by their respective privacy policies.
Contact
For privacy-related inquiries:
info@digitalconsciousness.institute
Last updated: 5 September 2026.