Privacy policy

Last updated: 29 July 2026.

The short version

Open Science Museum is a set of static HTML files. Reading it sets no cookies, runs no analytics, requests nothing from any third-party host, and creates no account or profile. The only personal data we ever hold is what you choose to email us, plus the routine access logs kept by the company that serves the files. We do not sell, rent, or share personal data, and there is no advertising technology anywhere on the site.

What is collected

If you only read the site: nothing by us. No cookies are set. No analytics or measurement script runs. No pixel, tag, beacon, fingerprinting script, or session recorder is present. No webfonts, stylesheets, images, videos, scripts, maps, or embeds are loaded from another domain, so no other company learns that you visited. There is no login, no newsletter, no comment system, and no local storage or session storage used to remember you.

If you email us: whatever your message and your mail headers contain — your address, name, subject, message body, and any attachment you send.

Server access logs. Our hosting provider, Namecheap, records ordinary web server request data as it serves pages: IP address, timestamp, the file requested, HTTP status, referring page if your browser sends one, and user-agent string. These logs are generated by the host's infrastructure, not by anything we added to the page. We do not use them to build profiles, do not combine them with any other data, and in ordinary operation do not read them at all — they exist for security and fault diagnosis.

Why it is collected

• Messages — to read and answer you, and to correct the site where you have told us something is wrong. Nothing more. We do not add you to a mailing list, and we do not have one.
• Access logs — to keep the site available and diagnose abuse, outages, and errors.

We do not use personal data for advertising, profiling, automated decision-making, resale, or training any machine learning model.

Retention

• Correspondence is kept in an email mailbox for as long as it is useful — an unresolved query stays open until it is resolved; a correction is kept as a record of when and why a page changed. Anything of no continuing use is deleted. You can ask us to delete your correspondence at any time.
• Access logs are retained and discarded by the host on its own schedule, which we neither set nor control. We do not download them, aggregate them, or analyze them, and we do not use them to build any profile of you.

Third parties

Two, and only in the roles described.

• Namecheap hosts the site and serves its files, and therefore handles the request data described above under its own privacy terms.
• Google operates the Gmail mailbox we publish as our contact address. Any message you email us is received and stored on Google's systems under Google's terms rather than ours, so if that matters to you, weigh it before writing.

There is nothing in between. This site has no contact form, no analytics, no advertising, no embedded video, and no third-party fonts or scripts, so simply reading a page here transmits nothing about you to anyone but the host that served it.

No one else receives anything. We run no advertising network, no analytics vendor, no customer data platform, no chat widget, and no A/B testing service. We do not sell or trade personal data, and we would not have anything to sell.

Two clarifications. Outbound links to libraries, archives, and museums are ordinary links — following one takes you to that institution, where their privacy policy applies and ours stops. Nothing is sent to them until you click. Separately, we may disclose data if a valid legal process compels it; if that happens and we are permitted to tell you, we will.

Children's privacy

The site is written for a general audience, including students and teachers, and it is safe to read at any age because reading it collects nothing. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, and there is no mechanism here designed to do so — no account, no profile, no tracking. Children should not send us email without a parent, guardian, or teacher. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, write to lumingrade@gmail.com and we will delete it.

International transfers

The site is served from our host's infrastructure, which may cache and deliver files from servers in several countries, so the machine answering your request may not be in your country. Our host processes request data in whatever locations its own infrastructure uses.

If you email us, your message is read and stored in the mailbox described above, which may be in a different country from you. We cannot offer the formal transfer safeguards a larger organization would put in place, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We hold no data at rest beyond that mailbox. If that arrangement is not acceptable to you, do not send us personal information — you can read every page on this site without sending any.

Requesting deletion or a copy

Write to lumingrade@gmail.com and ask. Say what you want — a copy of what we hold about you, a correction to it, or its deletion. Because the only thing we are likely to hold is an email thread, the request is usually simple to fulfill, and we do not charge for it. We may need to reply from or to the same address to confirm the request came from you.

One limit worth stating plainly: we cannot delete data we never had, and we cannot delete the host's access logs on your behalf, because we do not control their systems or their retention schedule. If we cannot fulfill part of a request, we will tell you which part and why.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS. There is no database, no user account, and no stored payment information, so there is very little here to breach. Email, however, is not a confidential medium: please do not send us sensitive personal information.

Changes to this policy

If the site's behavior changes — if we ever add analytics, a cookie, a newsletter, or any third-party resource — this policy and our cookies page will be updated before the change goes live, and the "last updated" date above will change with it. We do not intend to make any of those changes.

Questions about this policy go to lumingrade@gmail.com. This policy describes our practice; it is not legal advice and has not been reviewed by a lawyer.