What we collect, and what we don’t
theringgit sells nothing, runs no advertising and has no login. The only personal information it ever holds is an email address, and only if you choose to give us one.
The short version
- If you don’t subscribe, we hold nothing about you that identifies you. Reading the site leaves no account, no profile and no record with your name on it.
- If you subscribe, we hold your email address and which page you subscribed from. Nothing else.
- We do not store your IP address or your browser’s user agent. That is unusual, and it is deliberate.
- We never sell, rent or share the list. There is no advertising network on this site and no third-party tracking pixels.
- You can leave in one click, from any email we send, with no login and no reply required.
If you subscribe to the newsletter
The signup form asks for one thing: your email address. When you submit it we store exactly these fields, and this is the complete list:
- Your email address — so we can send you the newsletter.
- Which page you subscribed from — a page name such as
where-a-ringgit-of-tax-goes. It tells us which writing brings people in. It says nothing about you. - Whether you have confirmed, and the date you did.
- Two random tokens — one that confirms the address is really yours, one that unsubscribes you. They are meaningless outside this purpose.
- The date the record was created and last changed.
That is the entire record. There is no name field, no country field, no IP address and no browser fingerprint, because the code does not ask for them and the table has nowhere to put them.
Nothing happens until you confirm
We use double opt-in. Submitting the form sends you one email asking you to confirm. If you never click it, you never hear from us again — the unconfirmed record simply sits there, and it is deleted when we clear out unconfirmed signups.
Leaving
Every email carries an unsubscribe link that works in one click, with no login, no “are you sure” and no reply needed. If you would rather your record were deleted outright rather than marked unsubscribed, ask and we will delete it.
Analytics
We use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages people read. This exists for one reason: theringgit is a test of whether writing about Malaysian public money finds an audience, and without a count there is no way to answer that.
Google Analytics sets cookies in your browser and processes data on Google’s infrastructure under their own terms. We see aggregate reports — page views, rough location by country or city, which site you arrived from, what kind of device you used. We do not connect any of it to a person, and we have no way to link an analytics session to a subscriber.
If you would rather not be counted, browser privacy settings, an ad blocker, or Google’s own opt-out add-on all stop it, and the site works exactly the same without it.
Who else touches your data
Three services, each doing one job:
- Our hosting provider serves the pages. Like every web host, it processes the request your browser makes, which necessarily includes your IP address. We do not retain that in any store of ours.
- Our database provider stores the subscriber list described above.
- Our email provider sends the confirmation and the newsletter. It needs your address to deliver the message.
None of them is permitted to use your address for anything except delivering what you asked for. We do not sell, rent, trade or share the list with anyone else, for any purpose, ever.
How long we keep things
- Confirmed subscribers — until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete you.
- Unconfirmed signups — cleared out periodically. If you never confirmed, you are not on the list.
- Analytics — retained by Google under their own policy.
Asking us anything
You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Because the record is one email address, all three are quick. Write to us and we will do it.
Children
This is a publication about government budgets and corporate accounts. It is not aimed at children and we do not knowingly hold any child’s data.
Changes to this page
If what we collect changes, this page changes in the same breath — we do not update the code and leave the description behind, for the same reason we do not silently edit a published figure. Material changes get a dated note here rather than a quiet rewrite.