1. Who we are
The Good Ordinary is an independent lifestyle publication written and operated by Kayla Whitmore in Austin, Texas, United States. Throughout this policy, "we", "us" and "our" mean The Good Ordinary, and "you" means the person visiting this website or writing to us.
We are the controller of the personal information described in this policy. We are a very small publication, not a company with a data protection officer, and you can reach the person responsible for these decisions directly at kayla@thegoodordinary.com.
This policy covers thegoodordinary.com and any page on it. It does not cover other websites we link to, or the social media platforms where we also publish; those are covered in section 8.
2. The short version
We have tried to build a site that collects as little as possible. In plain terms:
- You can read everything here without giving us your name, your email address or any account.
- This site serves no advertising, loads no third-party fonts, and embeds no tracking pixels or social media widgets.
- Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs, which include IP addresses, in order to deliver pages and protect the site from abuse.
- If you email us, we have your email address and whatever you chose to put in the message, and we keep it so we can reply.
- We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
The rest of this policy is the detailed version. If something here is unclear, write to us and we will explain it in ordinary language.
3. Information we collect
3.1 Information you choose to give us
The only way to send us information through this site is to write to us. If you email kayla@thegoodordinary.com — to ask a question, send a correction, request permission to reuse something, or reply to a piece — we receive your email address, your name if your email client sends it, and the contents of your message and any attachment.
This site has no comment section, no account system, no newsletter sign-up form and no checkout. We never ask you for payment details, government identification, health information or any other sensitive category of data on this website.
3.2 Information collected automatically
Like essentially every website, this one is delivered by a hosting provider whose servers record technical information about each request. These server logs typically contain:
- your IP address, which may be truncated or anonymised depending on the provider's configuration;
- the date and time of the request and the page or file requested;
- the response status and amount of data transferred;
- your browser's user-agent string, which identifies the browser, its version and your operating system;
- the referring page, if you arrived through a link on another site.
We use these logs to deliver the site, to diagnose errors, and to identify abusive traffic such as scraping or denial-of-service attempts. We do not use them to build a profile of you and we do not attempt to identify individual readers from them.
3.3 Analytics
We are interested in how many people read a piece, not in who they are. If we use analytics on this site, we limit ourselves to privacy-respecting measurement that does not set advertising cookies, does not follow you across other websites and does not attempt to identify you as an individual. We do not use Google Analytics, advertising networks or data brokers, and we do not add remarketing or conversion pixels to this site.
4. Cookies and similar technologies
This website does not set advertising or tracking cookies, and it does not use browser storage to follow you between visits or between sites.
Strictly necessary cookies may be set by our hosting provider or a content delivery network for security purposes — for example, to filter malicious traffic or to balance load across servers. These are required for the site to work safely and are not used for marketing. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings at any time; this site will continue to function normally if you do.
If we ever introduce cookies that are not strictly necessary, we will ask for your consent first and update this policy before doing so.
5. How we use information
| Purpose | Information used | Legal basis (UK/EU) |
|---|---|---|
| Delivering pages and images to your browser | IP address, request data, user-agent | Legitimate interests |
| Keeping the site secure and available; investigating abuse | Server logs | Legitimate interests |
| Understanding which pieces are read, in aggregate | Aggregated, non-identifying measurement | Legitimate interests |
| Replying to your email, handling corrections and permissions | Your email address and message | Legitimate interests; performance of a request you made |
| Meeting legal obligations and responding to lawful requests | Whatever the obligation requires | Legal obligation |
We do not use your information to make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects, and we do not profile readers.
6. Legal bases for processing
If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, we rely on the following legal bases under the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR:
- Legitimate interests — running, securing and improving a small independent publication, and corresponding with readers who write to us. We have considered your rights and freedoms and believe this processing is limited and unsurprising. You may object at any time (see section 11).
- Consent — where we ever ask for it, for anything beyond what is strictly necessary. You may withdraw consent at any time, without affecting processing already carried out.
- Legal obligation — where we must retain or disclose information to comply with applicable law.
7. Who we share information with
We do not sell your personal information, we have never sold it, and we do not share it with data brokers or advertising networks.
We rely on a small number of service providers who process information on our behalf, under contract and only on our instructions:
- Our web host and content delivery network, which stores the site's files and serves them to your browser, and which keeps the server logs described above.
- Our email provider, which receives and stores messages sent to our address so that we can read and answer them.
- An analytics provider, if and while we use one, on the privacy-respecting terms described in section 3.3.
We may also disclose information where we are legally required to do so — in response to a valid subpoena, court order or other lawful request — or where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend legal claims, or to protect the rights and safety of any person. If The Good Ordinary is ever transferred to another owner, information would pass to the new owner under this same policy, and we would say so on this page before the change took effect.
8. Social platforms and external links
We also publish on social media platforms, including Facebook. When you interact with us there, that platform collects and processes your information according to its own privacy policy and terms, not this one. We can see the public activity and the messages you send us on those platforms; we cannot see, and do not receive, the broader profile data those companies hold about you.
Where a social platform collects information through a page we operate, we are responsible only for the limited information we actually receive there — for example, the content of a message you send us, which we handle in the way described in this policy. Everything else about your account and your activity on that platform is determined by the platform itself, under its own terms.
This site links to other websites we did not create. We choose them carefully, but we have no control over their content or their privacy practices, and this policy does not apply once you follow a link away from thegoodordinary.com. We suggest reading the privacy policy of any site that asks you for information.
9. How long we keep information
- Server logs: retained by our hosting provider for a short period — typically between 14 and 90 days — and then deleted or overwritten automatically.
- Email correspondence: kept for as long as the conversation is useful and then deleted, and in any case no longer than three years after the last message, unless we need it to resolve a dispute or meet a legal obligation.
- Aggregated measurement: retained indefinitely in aggregate form, because it no longer identifies anyone.
10. Where information is processed
We are based in the United States and our providers store and process information in the United States. If you are visiting from the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area or another country whose data protection laws differ from those of the United States, please understand that your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States.
Where such a transfer requires a safeguard under applicable law, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, or an adequacy mechanism our providers participate in, as appropriate.
11. Your privacy rights
Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the following rights over your personal information:
- Access — to ask what information we hold about you and receive a copy of it.
- Correction — to have inaccurate information corrected.
- Deletion — to ask us to erase information we hold about you.
- Restriction — to ask us to limit how we use your information while a question about it is resolved.
- Objection — to object to processing we carry out on the basis of legitimate interests.
- Portability — to receive information you gave us in a portable, machine-readable format.
- Withdrawal of consent — at any time, where we relied on consent.
- Non-discrimination — we will not treat you differently, or give you a worse experience of this site, for exercising any of these rights.
To exercise any of them, write to kayla@thegoodordinary.com with a short description of what you would like us to do. We will respond within 30 days, or within 45 days where the law allows an extension and we tell you why. We may need to ask a question or two to confirm that the request is genuinely yours, and we will not use anything you send for verification for any other purpose.
Requests are free. If a request is manifestly unfounded or repetitive, we may decline it, and we will explain why in writing.
If you are in the UK or EEA and you believe we have handled your information improperly, you are entitled to complain to your national supervisory authority — in the United Kingdom, the Information Commissioner's Office. We would appreciate the chance to put it right first.
12. Notice for California residents
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, California residents have the rights to know, delete, correct, and opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information, and to limit the use of sensitive personal information.
In the previous twelve months we have collected the category of "internet or other electronic network activity information" (server logs) and, where you have written to us, "identifiers" (your email address and any name you provide). We collected them for the purposes described in section 5, from you directly and from your interaction with the site.
We have not sold or shared personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising in the previous twelve months, and we do not do so now. We do not knowingly collect or process sensitive personal information through this site, and we have no financial incentive programme.
To make a request, write to kayla@thegoodordinary.com. You may use an authorised agent; we will ask for proof of their authority. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights.
13. Children's privacy
This site is written for a general adult audience. It is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, write to kayla@thegoodordinary.com and we will delete it promptly.
14. Security
This site is served over an encrypted HTTPS connection. Access to our email and to the site's files is protected by strong, unique passwords and two-factor authentication, and the number of people with access is one.
No website can promise perfect security, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can say is that the best protection we offer is not collecting much in the first place. Please do not send us sensitive personal information by email.
15. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control
There is still no common standard for how websites should respond to a browser's "Do Not Track" signal, so this site does not respond to it. That said, we do not track you across other websites in the first place, so the outcome is the one the signal asks for.
We honour the Global Privacy Control signal as a valid opt-out of sale and sharing. As stated above, we do not sell or share personal information, so there is nothing for us to stop doing.
16. Changes to this policy
If we change how we handle personal information, we will update this page and change the "last updated" date at the top of it. If a change is significant — for example, if we started using a new category of data or a new provider — we will say so clearly at the top of this page for at least 30 days.
This is the only place this policy lives. There is no separate version, and nothing about your privacy is buried elsewhere on the site.
17. How to contact us
Questions, requests and complaints about privacy all go to the same place:
- Email: kayla@thegoodordinary.com
- Publication: The Good Ordinary, an independent publication operated by Kayla Whitmore
- Location: Austin, Texas, United States
We read every message and answer as quickly as a one-person publication reasonably can.