Privacy
Pentrace collects very little about you. This page lists everything that is collected, who handles it and how to have it removed.
Pentrace.ink is a non-commercial fountain pen site run by Len Provisor and Donal Higgins, publishing new articles alongside an archive going back to 2000. There are no ads, no accounts and no analytics of our own. Questions about this page, or requests to see or delete anything we hold about you, go to privacy@pentrace.ink.
The Pentrace Letter
If you sign up for the monthly Pentrace Letter, we keep your email address so we can send it to you. The list is held by EmailOctopus, the service that sends the Letter for us; the sign-up page is on their site. You confirm your address before the first issue arrives.
EmailOctopus records whether an issue was opened and which links were clicked. We use that only to see which articles readers liked. We never sell, share or rent the list.
Every issue ends with an unsubscribe link, which removes you at once. To have your address deleted from the list entirely, write to the address above.
Our web host
The site is hosted by GoDaddy. Like any web server, theirs keeps a short log of each request (your IP address, the page asked for, the time and your browser’s name) to run and protect the site. We don’t use those logs to identify anyone.
GoDaddy also adds a small script to every page to measure how fast the site loads. It sets three cookies, _tccl_visitor, _tccl_visit and _scc_session, which give your browser a random ID so GoDaddy can tell one visit from another. Pentrace doesn’t see or use that data. You can block or clear these cookies in your browser’s settings and the site works just the same.
What stays in your browser
A few settings are kept in your own browser’s storage so the site remembers them. They never leave your device, and clearing your browser’s site data removes them:
- your Display Theme choice (dark, light or match device);
- the pages you save with the Save button, listed under Saved Articles;
- the last few categories you opened, shown under Recently visited in Search;
- a count of articles read, so the “Read Pentrace like an app” reminder appears only after a few, and the date you closed it.
Videos
A few articles include YouTube videos. They use YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode, so YouTube sets no cookies until you press play. Once you do, Google’s own privacy policy applies.
Emails and contributions
If you email a correction, or send an article through the contributor form, we keep your name, your address and what you sent for as long as we need to answer you and prepare the page. Contributions are stored privately on our server, never on the public site, and are deleted on request.
Other Pentrace places
The Message Board and PenMarket (hosted by Boardhost), the Pentrace Facebook group and Pentrace on Instagram are run on those services, under their own privacy policies.
Your rights
You can ask to see what we hold about you, to have it corrected, or to have it deleted, and we will answer within a month. If you’re not happy with our answer, you can complain to the data protection authority where you live.
Writers and photographers
Pentrace republishes two decades of writing and photographs from Pentrace.com and its contributors. If something you wrote or photographed is here and you want it credited differently, corrected or taken down, write to privacy@pentrace.ink and we’ll sort it out.