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Privacy Statement

Last updated:

What The Mantle Collective collects, how we handle it, and — deliberately — what we do not collect at all.

This is a working document. It reflects the site as it stands today. When something changes we update this page and the date at the top.

The short version

You can read the whole site without an account, without a login, and without being tracked across the web. We do not run an analytics script. We do not have a mailing list. We do not sell anything on the site.

Three specific tools do process a small amount of your data when you use them: the chatbot, the bot-verification widget, and our web hosting logs. Each is described below.

What we do not collect

We think this list matters as much as the one that follows.

  • No account, sign-up, or login. There is no user database.
  • No email newsletter. We do not have a form that captures your email address for marketing.
  • No analytics scripts. There is no Google Analytics, Plausible, Fathom, or similar tag on any page.
  • No tracking pixels, no advertising tags, no cross-site cookies of any kind.
  • No profile of you built up over visits.
  • No sale of data to anyone, ever.

What we do process, and why

The chatbot (Google Gemini via a Cloudflare Worker)

When you use the discovery chatbot, your typed question is sent to a small Cloudflare Worker we run, which forwards it to Google's Gemini API for an answer. The reply is sent back to your browser.

Your question is not stored on our server. We do not run one.

Google's free tier of the Gemini API — which we currently use — is the important detail: Google may use content sent to the free tier to improve their models. If we later move to Gemini's paid tier the terms change, and we will update this page. Until then: please do not put anything sensitive into the chatbot that you would not want to appear in a training dataset. There is a shorter version of this reminder alongside the chat input itself.

Your chat history is kept only in your own browser (in sessionStorage) so that opening the discovery panel again in the same tab shows your previous messages. Close the tab and it is gone. The history never touches our server.

Cloudflare Turnstile (bot verification)

To stop automated abuse of the chatbot we use Cloudflare Turnstile. It runs an invisible challenge when you send a chat message and produces a short-lived token that our worker verifies. Turnstile may set a cookie called cf_clearance on your browser as part of that check. It does not identify you personally. Cloudflare publishes the details in their own privacy notice.

Hosting logs

Our site is hosted by IONOS. Their web server keeps standard access logs — IP address, request path, response code, timestamp — for a short period, for security and abuse investigation. This is the same log every web server on the internet keeps. We do not aggregate or analyse those logs.

Rate-limit state

The Cloudflare Worker that fronts the chatbot briefly stores a per-IP counter (in Cloudflare KV) so it can enforce a per-minute rate limit. The counter expires within 60 seconds. It contains no other information about you.

Bookmarks and reading list

If you use the bookmark button anywhere on the site, the list of pages you have bookmarked is stored in your browser's localStorage. It stays on your device. It is not sent to us. You can clear it any time by clearing your browser's site data for mantlecollective.com.

Third parties, named

We deliberately keep this short.

  • Google — via the Gemini API for the chatbot. Their privacy policy applies to messages you send while the chat is open.
  • Cloudflare — via the Turnstile bot-verification widget and the worker infrastructure that fronts the chatbot. Their privacy notice applies.
  • IONOS — our web host. Their privacy policy applies to server logs.

We do not embed any other third-party services. No fonts loaded from Google Fonts, no analytics, no advertising, no social embeds.

Your rights

You have the usual rights under UK GDPR — access, correction, erasure, restriction, portability, objection. Given how little data we hold about you, most of these are moot: there is almost nothing to access or delete. If you want to raise something anyway, or if you believe we have got something wrong, please write to us at info@mantlecollective.com and we will respond within a reasonable time. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office if you are unhappy with our response.

Changes to this page

We will update this page whenever something material changes — for instance, if we move the chatbot to Google's paid tier, add a mailing list, or introduce a new third-party service. The date at the top of this page is the last time it was updated.

Contact

For any question about this statement or about your data, write to info@mantlecollective.com.