Privacy notice

Each page request leaves one record. The fields below, together with the time of the request, are the whole of it; there are no others.

Your IP address is used at the moment of the request to derive the location and the network, then discarded. It is never written to the analytics store.

Requests for images, stylesheets and fonts are not recorded, and neither is anything behind a private document link.

Anything after the question mark in an address is not recorded. The one exception is a source tag naming a recognised answer engine, which is read as the referrer described below and kept in no other form.

It is a truncated SHA-256 hash of four things joined together: a secret value held by Genba, today's date in UTC, your IP address, and your browser's user-agent string. The hash is stored. None of the four inputs is.

We call it pseudonymous rather than anonymous, and the distinction is deliberate. Genba keeps no list connecting the value to a person, and there is no way for us to search these records for an individual by name. What someone holding the secret value could do is take an IP address they already suspected, recompute the hash, and see whether it appears. We make no claim that the value is irreversible.

Because the UTC date is one of the four inputs, every identifier changes at midnight UTC. A reader who returns the next day appears as a new one. Behaviour across days is therefore outside what these records can be made to show, by construction rather than by policy.

The first is which of our published material is actually read, so we know what is worth writing next.

The second is firmographic: we use it to understand which organizations read our materials. Genba sells to investment firms, and the network name attached to a visit indicates the kind of organization a request came from, at the level of the organization. It identifies no person within it, and we use no vendor that resolves IP addresses into company or contact records.

These records are never used for advertising, never used to build a profile of you, never sold, and never shared beyond the two processors named below.

The measurement described above sets no cookie, reads no cookie, and stores nothing in your browser. Consent requirements for cookies and similar technologies attach to storing or reading information on your equipment, and measurement here does neither, which is why you are not asked to dismiss a banner before you can read.

The one thing this site stores is a language preference. On article pages, moving between the English and Japanese editions saves a two-letter language code under the key genba-locale in your browser's local storage, together with a single flag under genba-locale-redirected in session storage, which lasts only as long as the current tab. Their only job is to serve you the edition you last chose and to avoid bouncing you between the two. Neither value leaves your browser, neither is sent to us, and neither is joined to the records above. Clearing your browser's site data removes both.

A private link is issued to one email address. Opening it requires that address and a single-use code sent to it. Each access is recorded with the recipient's email address, the time, the IP address, the country and city derived from it, and the browser's user-agent string.

This record is identifiable by design. It is the audit trail for a confidential document, and it exists so the sender knows who opened what and when. Recipients receive these links directly from us.

These records are held separately from the site measurement above, under their own retention period, given below.

Two processors handle this data on our instructions. Cloudflare, Inc. operates the edge network, stores the measurement records and holds the private-document database. Google LLC provides the mailbox that receives mail sent to sales@genbalabs.com.

Where the UK or EU GDPR applies, the basis for site measurement is legitimate interest: understanding who reads material we publish. The basis for private-document access records is performing a confidential disclosure and holding evidence of it. Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act applies to us as a Singapore company.

You may ask what we hold, ask for a copy, ask for correction or erasure, or object to the processing. Write to sales@genbalabs.com and mark it for the attention of the privacy contact.

One practical limit is better stated than discovered. For the site-measurement records we generally cannot find your rows, because nothing in them identifies you to us. For a private document link we can, because that record is held against your email address.