Read the Garden · Privacy
Privacy Policy
Last updated: 9 September 2026
READ THE GARDEN is a newsletter and website about Japanese gardens. This page explains exactly what we collect, why, and what you can ask us to do about it. It is short on purpose. We would rather you read it than skim it.
The short version: we ask for your email address. We record which link brought you to us, and which links you click in our emails. We set no cookies. We sell nothing. You can leave in one click, and you can ask us to erase you entirely.
1. Who we are
READ THE GARDEN is published by {{PUBLISHER_LEGAL_NAME}}.
- Postal address: {{PUBLISHER_ADDRESS}}
- Email: hello@readthegarden.co
- Website: readthegarden.co
We are the data controller for the information described below. READ THE GARDEN is a small, independently run publication, not a company with a privacy department. When you write to hello@readthegarden.co, a person reads it.
2. What we collect
When you subscribe
You give us one thing: your email address. The signup form has one field, and that field is it. We do not ask for your name, your postal address, your phone number, your age, or your country.
Alongside your email address, the form sends six technical values that describe how you found us, not who you are:
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
signup_utm_source | The site or platform that linked to us — for example instagram |
signup_utm_medium | The kind of link — for example social or email |
signup_utm_campaign | Which campaign the link belonged to |
signup_utm_content | Which specific link or variant you clicked |
signup_source_page | Which page of our site you subscribed from |
signup_lead_magnet_id | Which guide you signed up to receive |
These values come from the link you arrived on. If you reached us by typing our address into your browser, most of them are simply empty.
After you subscribe
Our email provider records, against your subscriber record:
- Link clicks — which links you clicked in which issue, and when.
- Opens — whether an issue was opened. We record this because our email provider does it by default. We do not use it to decide anything; open tracking is unreliable, and we treat it as noise.
- Delivery status — whether an email bounced, and whether you have unsubscribed.
When you visit the site
Our website is served by Cloudflare. Like every website on the internet, ours receives your IP address and your browser's user-agent string in order to send you the page. We do not store either of those ourselves, and we do not build a profile from them.
We count page views using Cloudflare Web Analytics. It is cookieless: it does not use cookies or local storage, and it does not fingerprint visitors by IP address or user-agent. We can see that a page was viewed and roughly where in the world from. We cannot see who you are, and we cannot follow you from one visit to the next.
When you email us
If you write to hello@readthegarden.co, we hold your message — including your address and anything you chose to put in it — in our mailbox.
3. Cookies, and why there are none
READ THE GARDEN sets no cookies. Not analytics cookies, not advertising cookies, not preference cookies. There are no third-party tracking cookies on this site. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to.
There is one piece of local storage, and we would rather explain it than leave it undisclosed:
sessionStorage. When you arrive on a tagged link, your browser holds the campaign values from that link in
sessionStorageunder the keyrtg.utm.v1, along with the address of the page that referred you. This is not a cookie. It is never sent to a server automatically, it cannot be read by any other website, and your browser deletes it the moment you close the tab. Its only job is to remember where you came from long enough for the signup form to record it. The referring address is held there but is not sent to us. If you never subscribe, nothing in it ever leaves your browser.
Our fonts are served from our own domain. We deliberately do not load fonts from the Google Fonts CDN, so your browser makes no request to Google when you read this site. The font files live at readthegarden.co/fonts/ and are hosted by us.
We use no advertising pixels, no Google Analytics, no Meta Pixel, and no session-recording or heatmap tools. If that ever changes, we will name the new recipient on this page before turning it on.
4. Why we collect it
- Your email address: to send you the guide you asked for, and the newsletter.
- The six source fields: to understand which places bring readers who actually read. It tells us where to spend our time. It is about the channel, not about you.
- Click data: to learn which stories were worth writing, and to know whether the newsletter is genuinely being read rather than merely delivered.
- Site analytics: to count how many people visited a page.
- Your messages to us: to reply to you.
We do not use any of this to profile you, to make automated decisions about you, or to target advertising at you.
5. Legal basis
If the GDPR or the UK GDPR applies to you, these are the bases we rely on:
- Consent — for sending you the newsletter, and for the click and open records our email provider keeps as part of that service. You gave it by confirming your address, and you can withdraw it at any time by unsubscribing. Withdrawing it does not undo what we did while it was valid.
- Legitimate interests — for keeping a suppression record after you unsubscribe, so that we do not email you again by mistake, and for basic security and delivery logging. We think a former subscriber's interest in never hearing from us again is served, not harmed, by this.
- Legal obligation — where we are required to keep records of opt-outs.
If you are in Japan, we handle your information as a personal information handling business operator under the Act on the Protection of Personal Information, for the purposes set out in section 4.
6. Double opt-in
We use double opt-in. When you submit the form, our email provider sends you a confirmation email. Until you click the link in it, you are not subscribed and we do not send you anything else. If you never click it, nothing further happens.
This means nobody can add you to our list by typing your address into our form.
7. Who else touches your data
We use four services. This is the complete list.
| Service | What it handles | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Kit (email service provider) | Your email address, the six source fields, click and open records, subscription status | United States. Kit states that it and its service providers process and store personal information on servers in the United States and other countries. |
| Cloudflare Pages (hosting) | Serves our pages; receives your IP address and user-agent in order to do so | United States company, global network |
| Cloudflare Web Analytics | Counts page views. Cookieless, no fingerprinting | Same as above |
| Zoho Mail | The mailbox behind hello@readthegarden.co. Holds messages you send us | Operated by Zoho Corporation |
Your email address goes from the signup form straight to Kit, from your browser. We do not run a server in between, and there is no copy of your address on any machine of ours.
Kit acts as our processor and provides a Data Processing Addendum: kit.com/dpa.
We do not sell your data. We do not rent it, trade it, or hand it to advertisers. If we are ever legally compelled to disclose something, we will tell you unless we are forbidden to.
8. Sending data outside your country
We are based in Japan. Kit and Cloudflare are United States companies. If you are in the UK, the EU, or anywhere outside the United States, your data will be transferred to and handled in the United States.
We rely on the contractual protections our providers put in place for these transfers — Kit's Data Processing Addendum, and Cloudflare's equivalent terms. United States law does not offer the same protections as EU or UK law, and enforcement against a company in another country is harder than at home. We would rather say that plainly than bury it.
9. How long we keep it
- While you are subscribed: we keep your email address and the fields above for as long as you stay subscribed.
- After you unsubscribe: we do not delete your address automatically. It stays on a suppression list, marked unsubscribed, for one reason only — so that we never email you again by accident. We send nothing to it.
- If you ask us to erase you: we delete the record outright, including the source fields and the click history attached to it. We do this within 30 days.
- Your messages to hello@: we keep correspondence in the mailbox. Ask us and we will delete it.
- sessionStorage: deleted by your browser when you close the tab. We do nothing to it.
- Cloudflare Web Analytics: holds no record of you to keep, because it never identified you.
10. Unsubscribing
Every email we send has an unsubscribe link at the bottom. One click ends it. No confirmation page, no survey asking why, no login, no reply required. It is placed there automatically by our email provider and it always works.
Unsubscribing stops the emails. If you also want the record erased, say so — see below.
11. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you can ask us to:
- Access — tell you what we hold about you, and give you a copy.
- Rectify — correct anything inaccurate.
- Erase — delete you entirely.
- Port — give you your data in a machine-readable file, or send it to someone else.
- Object — stop processing that we base on legitimate interests.
- Restrict — pause processing while a dispute is resolved.
- Withdraw consent — at any time, including by unsubscribing.
If you are in Japan, you may also request disclosure, correction, or suspension of use of your retained personal data under the Act on the Protection of Personal Information.
To exercise any of these, email hello@readthegarden.co, or write to {{PUBLISHER_ADDRESS}}. We will respond within 30 days. We do not charge for this and we will not ask you to justify the request.
If you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to your data protection authority — the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK, your national supervisory authority in the EU, or the Personal Information Protection Commission in Japan. We would rather you told us first, but it is your right either way.
12. Children
READ THE GARDEN is written for adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has subscribed, email hello@readthegarden.co and we will delete the record.
13. Security
Your data sits with providers who handle it at a scale and standard we could not match ourselves. Our site is served over HTTPS. We hold no database of subscribers on any machine of our own, which means there is no subscriber list of ours to lose. No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise.
14. Changes to this policy
If we change this page, we change the date at the top.
If a change is material — a new recipient of your data, a new kind of collection, a new purpose — we will tell you in the newsletter before it takes effect, not after. We will not quietly widen what we do with your data and rely on you re-reading this page.
15. Contact
{{PUBLISHER_LEGAL_NAME}}
{{PUBLISHER_ADDRESS}}
hello@readthegarden.co