Privacy policy

I'm Pious Alpha, and I run piousalpha.com and its sites: this profile (me.piousalpha.com) and the journal (blog.piousalpha.com). I'm a private person in Antwerp, Belgium, and I decide what happens to the personal data these sites handle: under the GDPR, I'm its controller.

Questions or requests about your data: privacy@skyll.io.

• Pages load without tracking. Analytics runs only if you allow it, and you can change your mind any time under "Cookies" at the bottom of every page.
• What you type into PiousLLM goes to an AI provider to write the answer, and is kept for a limited time. Please don't type anything personal.
• I don't sell your data, show ads or build profiles to identify you.

A hosting provider serves these sites for me. To send you the pages and protect them from attacks, it handles your IP address and what every browser sends with a request: the page asked for, the time, and your browser and device type. I keep no request logs of my own. The reason is my legitimate interest in running the sites safely (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)).

Fonts, images and scripts all come from my own sites: nothing is loaded from anywhere else unless you allow analytics.

If you choose "Allow" in the banner, the sites load an analytics service, which records how the sites are used, so I can see what works and make them better:

• the pages you visit, how long you stay, and where you came from (the referring site or a campaign tag in the link);
• your clicks, including the ones I count as results: booking a call, emailing me, downloading my CV and following a link to another site;
• where people click and scroll on a page (heatmaps), clicks that do nothing, page errors, and how fast pages load;
• a replay of your visit: what was on screen and how the mouse and page moved. What you type into form fields is hidden;
• your browser, device, screen size, language and rough location (country and city), worked out from your IP address, which isn't stored.

To recognize a returning visitor, it keeps a random identifier in a cookie and in your browser's storage, shared by the piousalpha.com sites, for up to a year. I never link it to your name or email.

The service is based in the United States and processes this for me in the European Union, in Frankfurt. It keeps events for a year and replays for 30 days. The reason is your consent (GDPR Art. 6(1)(a) and, for what's stored in your browser, Art. 10/2 of the Belgian law of 30 July 2018).

You can withdraw it at any time under "Cookies" at the bottom of every page: analytics stops, and the sites delete its cookie and storage from your browser. If you don't allow it, nothing analytics is ever loaded.

A cookie called "pa_consent" remembers whether you allowed analytics, on all the piousalpha.com sites, for 182 days, so the banner doesn't ask on every page. After that, or when what the banner asks changes, it asks again. The cookie holds only your choice.

"Book a call" first passes through me.piousalpha.com/go/cal, which adds one to a count of clicks for the day and takes you on to the booking page. Only the count is kept, for three months, not your address, browser or the page you came from. The reason is my legitimate interest in knowing whether people use the link.

A scheduling service in the United States runs the booking page and processes what you enter there for me: your name, email, the time you pick and anything you write. If you allowed analytics, the link also tells it which of my pages you came from. I use these details to arrange and hold the call (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)) and keep them for up to two years after we were last in touch.

PiousLLM is an AI that answers questions about my work. When you ask it something, your question and the page's language are sent to an AI provider, which writes the answer. Nothing else goes with it: no earlier messages, no cookies, nothing about you. Please don't type anything personal.

• Each question and answer is kept for 30 days, so I can see what people ask and improve the answers. Then they're deleted.
• The AI provider may keep them for up to 55 days to detect abuse, in any country where it has facilities. It doesn't use them to train its models.
• To stop abuse, the questions from your network are counted for the day under a scrambled key made from your IP address and the date. The address itself isn't stored, and the count is deleted when the day ends.
• For each question a log records only what happened (answered, refused or failed, and how long it took), without your words or your address. It's kept three days.
• Your conversation stays in this browser tab, so it survives a reload. It's deleted after an hour without activity, when you close the tab or when you press Replay.

The reason is my legitimate interest in answering visitors' questions about my work and in keeping the chat from being abused. You can object to it; the simplest way is not to use the chat.

When you email me, my email provider, in Switzerland, stores the message for me. "Email me" in PiousLLM opens a draft in your own email app with your last question and the page's address filled in, which you can change before sending. I use your email to reply (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b), or my legitimate interest when it isn't about working together) and keep it for up to two years after we were last in touch.

Four services act for me, and only for me: the one that hosts these sites and counts the clicks out, the one that writes PiousLLM's answers, the one that takes bookings, and my email provider. A fifth, the analytics service, receives anything at all only if you allow it. They are in the United States, except my email provider, which is in Switzerland. If you want to know which companies they are, ask me and I'll tell you.

Where data leaves the European Union, it's protected by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or the European Commission's standard contractual clauses; Switzerland has an EU adequacy decision. I share data with no one else, unless the law requires it.

The sites link to X, Instagram, GitHub, LinkedIn, Skyll® and Cal.com. They open in their own tabs, and their own privacy policies apply there.

You can ask me for a copy of your data, to correct or delete it, to limit what I do with it, or to receive it in a portable form. You can object to what I do on the basis of my legitimate interest, and withdraw your consent to analytics at any time, without affecting what happened before.

Write to privacy@skyll.io. I answer within a month. Since I don't know who you are from most of this data, I may need details to find yours: for a chat question, its words and roughly when you asked.

If you think I handle your data wrongly, you can complain to the Belgian Data Protection Authority, at dataprotectionauthority.be.

When the sites start handling data differently, I update this page and its date first. If the change affects what the banner asks, it asks you again. The terms of use cover the rest of the rules for using the sites.