How Jade Almanac handles your data

Jade Almanac is a small publication about Chinese culture. We built it to need as little of your data as possible, and this page explains, in plain language, the little we do handle and where it goes. If anything here is unclear, write to hello@jadealmanac.com.

The short version

• We run no ads and set no tracking cookies. The site's one cookie is functional: if you buy a reading, it remembers your reading's key on your device so your chart page can open it. It identifies a reading, not a person, and follows you nowhere.
• Dates you type into our free calculators are used to compute your result on the spot and are never stored.
• If you buy a Deep Reading, we store what is needed to write it and keep your private reading page alive: your birth moment, your questionnaire answers, and the finished reading. Nothing else, and you can have it all deleted.
• If you subscribe, your email address goes to our email service (Kit) and nowhere else.
• Our analytics are cookieless and aggregate. We cannot identify you from them.

What you type into our tools

Our calculators (the gender predictor, calendar converter, age calculator, and kua calculator) ask for dates: a birthday, a due date, or a conception date. These are used once, in the moment, to compute the page you see. We do not save them in any database, we do not build a profile from them, and we cannot connect them to you later.

Two honest details. First, the dates travel to our server as part of the result page's web address, so they sit in your own browser history and pass through the standard, short-lived traffic logs of our hosting provider, the same way any page address does. Second, if you share a result link, the dates are visible inside that link, so share it only with people you are comfortable seeing them.

The calligraphy tool renders what you type directly in your browser. If you use "See it in Chinese" on a word we have not covered ourselves, the text you typed is sent to Google's translation service to fetch a machine translation, so it is best not to type anything private there.

The paid Deep Reading

The Deep Reading is the one place on this site where storing your data is the product: your reading lives at a private address and keeps growing, so what it is built from has to be kept. When you buy one, we store the email you purchased with, your order number, the birth moment you enter, your questionnaire answers, and the finished reading itself. They live in our hosting provider's storage (Cloudflare), keyed to your reading's private link, and are used for exactly one thing: writing your reading, showing it to you, and answering the follow-up questions your purchase includes.

One honest detail that matters: your reading is written by an AI writing model. That means your birth moment and your questionnaire answers are sent, over an encrypted connection, to the model provider we use at the time, which processes them to produce the text and is contractually barred from using them to train models. We send no name with them beyond whatever you chose to write in your answers.

Payments are handled entirely by our store (Gumroad). Your card details go to them and their payment processors, never to us; we receive your email and order ID, which is what lets you claim your reading.

Your reading stays available for as long as we run the product, so your private page keeps working. Write to hello@jadealmanac.com from your purchase email at any time and we will delete the reading, the record behind it, or both, for good.

Email

Our subscribe boxes (the newsletter, tool waitlists, and the symbols pack) collect one thing: your email address. It is forwarded to Kit (ConvertKit), the email service we use, which stores it and handles sending and unsubscribing. We use it to send you the thing you signed up for and occasional site updates. Every email includes an unsubscribe link, and you can also write to us to have your address deleted from Kit entirely. We never sell your email or share it beyond this.

Analytics and cookies

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookieless: it gives us aggregate counts, such as which pages are read and roughly which country readers are in, without fingerprinting you or following you across sites. The only cookie we set is the functional one described in the short version above, for buyers of a reading; there are no tracking cookies, and no advertising or social media tracking anywhere on the site.

The services we rely on

• Cloudflare hosts the site and provides the analytics above. Like any host, it keeps standard, transient traffic logs for security and operations.
• Kit (ConvertKit) stores subscriber email addresses and sends our email.
• Gumroad is the store for paid readings: it runs the checkout, holds your payment details, and handles sales tax. We never see your card.
• An AI model provider processes the birth moment and questionnaire answers of paid readings to write the text, under terms that bar training on them.
• Google serves the site's fonts, which means your browser requests those font files from Google's servers, and provides the machine translation described above.

Retention

For visitors and free-tool users we keep no database, so there is nothing to retain. Subscriber emails stay in Kit until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them. Paid readings and the records behind them are kept so your private page keeps working, and are deleted on request as described above.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, for example in the EU or UK under GDPR or in California under the CCPA, you may have formal rights to access or delete personal data held about you. In our case that data is your email address at Kit and, if you bought a Deep Reading, the reading record described above. Write to hello@jadealmanac.com and we will handle it. Everything else you enter on the site is computed and discarded, so there is nothing to request.

Children

Jade Almanac is a general-audience cultural publication and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children; the little we collect, an email address, requires a deliberate signup.

Changes

If our practices change, for example if a new feature needs new data, we will update this page and the date at the top before the change goes live.