Privacy notice
This page explains, without ceremony, what reaches me when you write through the site, what becomes of it, and what you can ask me to do with it. This is a solo practice. No marketing team sorts your message, and no shared mailbox circulates it around an office.
Who is responsible
This site is the working notebook of Arden Vale, an advisor on generative engine optimization for B2B SaaS. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and laws of like effect, the party answerable for the data set out here is the operator of generative-engine-optimizations.com. For any privacy matter, or to exercise a right described below, write to hello@generative-engine-optimizations.com.
What reaches me
Submitting the form on the request page sends me the following:
- Your name and email address — the minimum I need to write back and address you correctly.
- A second channel, should you offer one (phone, LinkedIn, Signal), for the times email is not your preference.
- The text of your message: the product, the category, the misreading, and the pages you point me toward. Only name and email are mandatory; everything else is yours to include or withhold.
These details serve a single purpose: answering the message you sent. No list subscribes you, no third party receives your data (the lone exception is the payment service described below, and only when a payment is genuinely made), and nothing is aggregated or mined past our own correspondence. Stored beside the message are the timestamp and a salted SHA-256 hash of your IP address, which is what holds automated abuse at bay. The raw IP is never recorded; neither are browser fingerprints or device signatures.
What I never gather
- No tracking cookies. The analytics in use run cookie-free and store no per-visitor identifier.
- No retargeting pixels, no marketing-automation tags, and no ad-network trackers are built into the site.
- No automated profiling, and no automated decisions that produce a legal effect for you.
- No sale or sharing of personal data with commercial partners. That is plainly not how this practice makes its living.
The legal basis I rely on
Messages from the form are processed under GDPR art. 6(1)(b), as steps taken at your request ahead of any possible engagement. The IP hash that defends the form against abuse rests on GDPR art. 6(1)(f), a legitimate interest in keeping the form usable. Where payment-outcome data exists, it is processed on the contractual basis.
How long things are kept
- Request messages: retained for the run of the engagement and 24 months afterward, so the thread of the conversation survives, then erased. Messages that never become work are kept for 12 months and then erased.
- Payment records: kept for as long as tax and accounting law demands (commonly 5–6 years), then erased.
- IP hashes: kept for 90 days, sufficient for abuse defence, then erased.
- Email threads: kept while we work together, or for 24 months after our last exchange, whichever is longer.
The rights you hold
Under GDPR and comparable law you may request access to your data, its correction, its deletion, its portability, a limit on its use, or you may object to its use. To do any of these, write to hello@generative-engine-optimizations.com and I will respond within 30 days. If you believe the law has been breached, you may lodge a complaint with your local data-protection authority.
Where the data is held
The servers behind this site are located in European Union (Germany). If any further processors (email provider) operate outside the European Union, those transfers rely on standard contractual clauses alongside the safeguards each one publishes.
Revisions to this notice
I revise this notice whenever my handling of data shifts in a way that matters. The "Updated" date at the top marks the current version. When a change is material, I note it on the home page for 30 days so returning readers catch it.