Last updated: 27 August 2026
This policy covers lightyearlabs.ca and everything under it, including the blog, the photography pages, and the resume.
This is a personal, non-commercial site. There are no accounts, no advertising, no comment system, no newsletter, and no payment processing. What follows is a plain description of the small amount of information that gets recorded when you visit, why it exists, and how long it stays.
What I do not do
I do not set tracking cookies, I do not run advertising or affiliate networks, I do not use Google Analytics or any other hosted analytics service, I do not embed social media widgets or tracking pixels, and I do not share, sell, or trade information about visitors with anyone. There is no login and no reason for you to give me your name.
Analytics
Page visits are counted using Umami, which is open source software I run myself on a server I own. It records the page you looked at, the referring site if there was one, your general browser and operating system, your device type and screen size, and the country your request appears to come from. It sets no cookies and does not store your IP address; the address is hashed with a salt that rotates daily in order to tell one visit from another, which means the record cannot be traced back to you and cannot be linked across days.
I look at this to find out which pieces people actually read and whether links from elsewhere are working.
Web server logs
The NGINX server that delivers these pages writes an access log for each request containing your IP address, the page requested, the time, your browser user agent string, and the referring page. This is ordinary server machinery, and I use it to find broken links, diagnose configuration errors, and identify abusive traffic.
Logs rotate on the standard Debian schedule and are kept for roughly 14 days on the live server. Because the system is backed up to a Proxmox Backup Server, log data may survive inside those backups for up to 12 months before it ages out. I do not read the logs looking for individual people, and I do not cross-reference them against anything.
Content loaded from other servers
Parts of this site are delivered by other people's servers rather than mine, and when your browser fetches those files it contacts those companies directly, which means each of them receives your IP address, your browser user agent, and the address of the page you were viewing. I receive nothing from those transactions and have no visibility into what is done with them.
At present this includes jsDelivr, which serves the photo gallery script, its lazy-loading library, and jQuery; cdnjs, operated by Cloudflare, which serves mathematical typesetting and icon fonts; and Google Fonts, which serves the typefaces. In addition, the xkcd comics appearing in the Canadian rail journey article are linked directly from xkcd's own server at imgs.xkcd.com rather than copied onto mine, so loading that page contacts them as well.
Most of this is a default inherited from the themes I am using rather than a decision I made deliberately, and I intend to serve these files from my own server, at which point this section will get considerably shorter. The Google Fonts requests are the ones I consider most worth removing.
Everything else, including all images, stylesheets, and other scripts, comes from my own infrastructure.
Google Search Console
I use Google Search Console to see how this site appears in Google's search results. It places nothing on these pages and collects nothing from your visit. The data it shows me comes from Google's own records of its crawler and its search results, is aggregated, and contains no information about individual visitors. Your dealings with Google itself are governed by Google's privacy policy, not this one, and are outside my control.
Photo albums
Many photographs are served from albums.lightyearlabs.ca, which runs Photoview on hardware I own. That system requires a login, and material reaches the public only through specific share links that I create deliberately and embed in these pages. No account is created for you and no personal information is collected there.
Feeds
The RSS and Atom feeds are plain static files and contain no tracking of any kind.
If you write to me, I will have your email address and whatever you put in your message, and I will keep it for as long as the correspondence remains useful, which in practice means indefinitely unless you ask otherwise. I will not add you to any list, because there is no list. If you would like our correspondence deleted, ask and I will delete it.
Children
This site is not directed at children and collects nothing that would identify anyone of any age.
Your rights
British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act and the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act give you rights to access and correct personal information held about you. In practice I hold almost none: hashed and unlinkable analytics records, short-lived server logs, and any email you have sent me. If you want to know what exists about you, or want it removed, write to me and I will deal with it directly rather than routing you through a process.
Changes
If this changes, I will change this page and update the date at the top. There is no mailing list to notify, so if you care about the details it is worth checking back.
Contact
Triston Line Triston.Line@LightyearLabs.ca
A postal address is available on request for anyone who needs one for a formal purpose.