Privacy Policy

This website, piercepublishing.app, is published by Pierce Publishing House LLC, an independent publisher and digital-product studio based in Dallas, Texas, USA (“we”, “us”). We are the controller of the personal information described in this policy. You can reach us about privacy at any time at hello@piercepublishing.app.

This policy covers this website, including Pierce Newsroom. Our Pantry app is a separate service with its own Privacy Policy, and books bought through retailers such as Amazon are covered by that retailer’s policies.

• We do not use analytics, advertising pixels, or tracking or advertising cookies.
• We do not sell or share your personal information, and we have not done so in the past 12 months.
• The only personal information we collect is what you choose to send us: through the contact form, by email, or by subscribing to The Daily Brief.
• Your browser keeps two small, non-identifying preferences for this site, which you can clear at any time.

When you contact us. The contact form asks for your name, email address, a topic and your message. We use them only to read and answer your message, and the legal basis for that under the GDPR is our legitimate interest in replying to people who write to us (Article 6(1)(f)), or taking steps you ask for before an agreement (Article 6(1)(b)). Depending on how the form is set up, your message is either handed to your own email app to send, or delivered to our inbox through a form-handling service acting on our behalf.

When you visit. Like every website, our hosting provider receives technical information with each request, such as your IP address, browser type, the page requested and the time. It is used to deliver the site, keep it secure and diagnose faults, under our legitimate interest in running a safe, working website. We do not use it to build a profile of you.

What we do not collect. We do not ask for, and do not knowingly receive, sensitive information such as health, financial or government identification details. Please do not send it through the contact form.

If you subscribe to The Daily Brief, we collect your email address, the page you subscribed from and when. We use it only to send you the newsletter, on the basis of your consent (GDPR Article 6(1)(a)). The address is held by the email service that sends the newsletter on our behalf, and is never sold or shared with advertisers.

Every issue has a one-click unsubscribe link, and you can also email hello@piercepublishing.app to be removed. We delete your address from the list when you unsubscribe, keeping only what is needed to make sure you are not emailed again.

This site uses no advertising, analytics or cross-site tracking cookies. It stores only the following:

• Sound preference (pierce:audio, local storage): remembers whether you turned the site’s ambient sound on. It stays until you clear it.
• Intro seen (pierce:visited, session storage): skips the opening animation after your first page, and is deleted when you close the tab.
• Staff sign-in (pierce_admin, a secure, HTTP-only cookie): set only when a member of our team signs in to an internal page. Visitors never receive it.

These are strictly necessary for features you ask for, so no consent banner is required for them. None of them identifies you or is shared with anyone. You can remove them through your browser’s settings for this site, and the site keeps working without them.

We share personal information only with service providers that help us run this website, under contract and only to provide that service:

• Vercel Inc. hosts the website and processes the technical request information described above.
• Email, form-handling and newsletter providers deliver and store the messages you send us and send The Daily Brief to subscribers.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or to protect the rights, safety or property of our readers, our team or the public. If Pierce Publishing House is ever reorganised or sold, this information would pass to the new owner under the same protections. We never sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

Images in our articles are served from our own website, so viewing them does not send your information to the photographers’ platforms. Links to other sites, such as retailers and the sources in our articles, are governed by those sites’ own policies once you follow them.

We keep correspondence for as long as we need it to deal with your enquiry and any follow-up, and then for no more than three years unless it relates to an ongoing matter or the law requires us to keep it longer. Hosting logs are kept by our hosting provider for a limited period under its own retention schedule. You can ask us to delete your messages sooner at any time.

We are based in the United States, and our service providers may process information in the United States and other countries. When personal information of people in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland is transferred, we rely on our providers’ approved safeguards, such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses or the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified.

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• tell you what personal information we hold about you and give you a copy (access and portability);
• correct information that is wrong (correction);
• delete it (deletion);
• stop or restrict using it, or object to how we use it (restriction and objection).

Texas residents have these rights under the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act, along with the right to opt out of the sale of personal data, targeted advertising and profiling. We do none of those. If we refuse a request, you may appeal by replying to our decision, and if you are not satisfied with the outcome of the appeal you may contact the Texas Attorney General.

California residents have the rights to know, delete and correct, the right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information (we do neither), the right to limit the use of sensitive personal information (we do not collect it), and the right not to be discriminated against for using any of these rights. In the past 12 months we have collected identifiers and contact details (name, email address), the contents of messages you send us, and internet activity limited to technical request information, from you and your browser, for the purposes described above.

People in the EEA, UK and Switzerland have the rights listed above under the GDPR and UK GDPR, and the right to complain to their local data-protection authority.

To use any of these rights, email hello@piercepublishing.app. We will confirm receipt, may ask for information to verify that the request is yours, and will respond within 45 days (within one month for GDPR requests), telling you if we need longer and why. You may use an authorised agent, and we will ask for proof of their authority. We honour Global Privacy Control signals, although this site has nothing for them to turn off.

The site is served only over HTTPS, the contact form is validated on our server, and internal pages are protected by a signed, HTTP-only cookie. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, but we take reasonable measures to protect what you send us and limit who can see it to the people who answer it.

We publish books for children, but this website is intended for parents, educators and other adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 (or under 16 in the EEA and UK). If you believe a child has sent us personal information, email hello@piercepublishing.app and we will delete it.

If we change how we handle personal information, for example by adding analytics, we will update this policy before the change takes effect and revise the date at the top. Read it alongside our Terms of Service.