Last updated: 26 October 2026. This notice describes the current Saints and Science website. Saints and Science is the publisher and the contact for questions about information collected here: hello@saintsandscience.com.
When you join the Sunday Letter
The form asks for your email address and your agreement to receive the Sunday Letter. We save the address, the time of that agreement, the version of the consent wording you accepted, whether you used the homepage signup or a Sunday Letter signup (on the letter page or an article), and the status of your subscription: pending until you confirm it, active after you confirm, and unsubscribed or suppressed after you leave or if your address cannot receive mail. We also keep a short history of consent and subscription changes (the type of change and its date, without your address).
We use this record to send the Sunday Letter only to people who confirmed, and to document consent. Duplicate submissions do not create extra subscriptions. The site owner receives an email notification for a new signup or a renewed signup, containing the submitted email address, signup time, and form source. The notification does not confirm the subscription. We do not ask for your name, postal address, date of birth, or payment details.
Confirmation, welcome, and the Sunday Letter
After you join, we send one confirmation email. You are subscribed only after you open its link and press the confirmation button on this website; ignoring it leaves you unsubscribed. After you confirm, we send one welcome email, followed by the Sunday Letter. Every email sent to a subscriber includes an unsubscribe link that works without signing in, and email programs that offer a one-click unsubscribe button can use it. A pending request can be cancelled the same way.
Emails are delivered by Resend, an email delivery provider, which processes your address and the message content to send them: Resend’s privacy policy. We record whether Resend accepted each message and, when Resend reports them, deliveries, bounces, and spam complaints. A permanent bounce or a spam complaint stops further email to that address. We do not use open tracking, click tracking, or tracking images. Links in our emails carry a coded reference to your subscription, not your email address.
Where signup information is stored
Signup records are stored in a PostgreSQL database provided by Supabase. The website is hosted through ChatGPT Sites. The database does not allow public reading of signup records. Viewing, exporting, or removing records is restricted to the site owner after a verified sign-in. We do not sell the list, publish subscriber addresses, or use them for advertising. Your address is shared with Resend to deliver Sunday Letter emails and signup notifications to the site owner; signup records are not sent to Substack or another newsletter service.
Hosting and infrastructure providers process information to operate and protect their services, and their own policies apply to that processing: Supabase’s privacy policy and OpenAI’s privacy policy. Cloudflare provides the domain’s DNS service and the optional audience measurements described below. The website is served by ChatGPT Sites; our domain’s Cloudflare DNS records are configured as DNS only. Cloudflare’s own policies describe its infrastructure and analytics processing: Cloudflare’s privacy policy. If we change the way this website collects, stores, or uses information, we will update this notice.
Keeping and removing records
We keep a signup record until you ask for removal or we decide it is no longer needed for this publication. There is no automatic subscriber-expiration schedule. To request a copy, correction, or removal of your signup, write to hello@saintsandscience.com and identify the address concerned. We may need to confirm that a request relates to your own information.
A removal request deletes the signup from the active subscriber list. Information in hosting backups or operational logs may remain for the provider’s applicable retention period. Messages you send to our inquiry address are handled separately so that we can respond to your request.
Abuse prevention and operational records
The signup form is protected by a hidden spam field, a limit on submission size, and a check that the submission comes from this website. To slow repeated automated attempts, the signup service keeps three short-lived submission counters: one for the whole website each minute, one for each submitted email address each hour, and one for each connecting network address each minute when the hosting platform supplies it. Each counter is stored as a one-way scrambled code derived from the relevant value (the minute, the hour combined with the submitted address, or the minute combined with the connecting address), together with the count and an expiry time. The service does not save a raw connecting IP address, the submitted email address itself, or browser user-agent information in these counters. The site-wide and connecting-address counters expire within about two minutes; the per-address counter expires within about an hour. Counters are cleared during later signup processing, so cleanup is not guaranteed to occur at the exact expiry time.
The hosting platform may separately process connection information, request logs, and security data. The website is public to read, and readers do not need an account. Only the subscriber management area is protected: when the site owner signs in to manage the list, a sign-in session is kept in that owner’s browser storage. That sign-in is separate from the signup list.
Your reading preferences
Saved stories and your light, dark, or system appearance preference are stored locally in your browser. This lets the website remember your choices on that browser. These preferences are not added to the subscriber list or synchronized through a Saints and Science reader account. You can clear them through your browser’s site-data settings.
Audience measurements
We use Cloudflare Web Analytics on public pages to understand page views, visits, referring websites, broad country and device information, and page performance. It does not use analytics cookies or identify a person across websites. These counts are estimates of visits, not a list of identifiable readers. Cloudflare states that it does not log URL query strings. We do not send signup addresses, account details, or comment text as analytics events.
We do not load this analytics service on account, owner, email-confirmation, unsubscribe, or unknown pages, or on preview hosts. Browser automation and browsers requesting Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control are excluded. We do not use advertising trackers. Hosting providers may separately keep operational request and security logs.
You can exclude visits from this browser using the control below. This choice is saved locally on this device; it is not a tracking identifier. Repeat it in each browser you use. Clearing this site’s browser data removes the choice. The site owner and testers use the same control to keep their visits out of audience measurements.
Exclude this browser from audience measurements · Allow audience measurements in this browser
Your browser’s measurement preference will appear here when JavaScript is available.
Read about Cloudflare Web Analytics and Cloudflare’s privacy policy. Article links may take you to other organizations’ websites, which have their own privacy practices.
Online contributions
Contributions are made to Saints and Science through Stripe’s hosted checkout. The buttons on our support page take you to Stripe, where you enter your payment details. This website does not collect or store card details. Stripe processes your payment under its privacy policy and sends your receipt. Monthly contributions can be managed or cancelled through Stripe’s customer portal.
Reader accounts and discussion
If you sign in to join the discussion, our sign-in service, Supabase, stores your email address and account details so that you can sign in. Your address is verified with a one-time code sent in a transactional sign-in email delivered through Resend, our email sending service; that message is only for signing in and is separate from the Sunday Letter. Your email address is never shown publicly; the only public information is the display name you choose. Comments you submit are reviewed before they appear and are processed by FastComments, our discussion service, which receives your display name and comment text. If you delete a comment, its text is removed while any replies to it are kept. If you delete your account, your profile and sign-in are removed and the text of your comments is removed; a neutral placeholder remains only where another reader’s reply needs it. Reader accounts are separate from the Sunday Letter email list; signing in does not subscribe you to anything.
The interactive saints atlas
The atlas uses Google Maps when it is configured and available, with OpenStreetMap as a fallback. Your browser connects to the selected provider to display the map; Google may receive the map view and locations selected on it. See Google’s privacy policy, the Google Maps terms, and the OpenStreetMap Foundation privacy policy. Shrine searches and directions open Google Maps when you choose one of those links. Name and country filters run in your browser and are not sent to our newsletter or discussion services.
Questions about privacy
Contact hello@saintsandscience.com. For information about how the articles are prepared, read our editorial methods.