Privacy & Data Ownership

Welcome to The Fallen Pears Archives. This website operates under a strict philosophy of complete digital independence and data minimization. We believe that your attention, your location, and your digital footprint are your own property, not commodities to be harvested by corporate tech monopolies.

The Technical Baseline: No Third-Party Tracking

When you visit this archive, you are entering a secure, static environment. We have explicitly engineered this site to block standard third-party tracking mechanisms, while utilizing only self-hosted tools to measure the reach of our physical art projects.

• No Third-Party Tracking Cookies: We do not allow Google, Meta, or any other advertising network to inject tracking cookies into your browser. We utilize only a single, local, anonymous functional cookie to prevent duplicate interactions on our webpage appreciation buttons. This contains no personal information and cannot track you across the internet.
• Self-Hosted, Cookieless Observation: To measure general engagement, we run a private, cookieless analytics tool entirely on our own server. This logs basic page views and broad geographic regions so we know if our work is being found.
• Public Drop Verification: To measure the effectiveness of our physical art drops (like library box installations), we use self-hosted link management software. While this creates a log of scan events to filter out automated bots and verify human engagement, it is strictly managed on our private server. We do not use third-party scripts to harvest your demographic data or track your behavior across the web.
• Embedded Third-Party Content: When we embed media (such as YouTube videos), we utilize “Privacy-Enhanced Mode.” This ensures that the third-party provider does not store information about your visit to our site unless you explicitly click the “Play” button on the video player.
• No Bloatware: This site is built on lightweight, open-source infrastructure. We have stripped out all unnecessary “companion plugins” and corporate widgets.
• Encrypted Connections: Every page, download, and image is served over a strict, server-level encrypted connection (https://).

If you are simply reading our manuscripts or looking at the local outpost map, your visit is counted as a strictly anonymous data point on our private server.

What Information We Actually Collect (And Why)

Because we believe in total data transparency, we want you to know exactly what happens if you choose to interact with us:

• Anonymous Functional Data: If you use the anonymous appreciation button, a local functional cookie is used by your browser to record that an interaction took place. No personal data is captured.
• Anonymous Geographic Data: We record aggregate, anonymous page views and city-level locations to monitor the success of our local art drops. This contains no personally identifiable information.
• Public Drop Interaction Data: When a physical QR code from our project is scanned, our self-hosted software logs the click event and the associated IP address. This is stored internally and exclusively for the purpose of bot-filtering and verifying that our physical installations are being discovered by real people. This data is never shared with third parties or sold.
• Embedded Media Interactions: We embed videos using privacy-preserving configurations that prevent third-party tracking. No data is shared with the video provider unless you choose to interact with the media player (e.g., clicking “Play”). We do not use these embeds to track, profile, or log your behavior.
• Contact Form Submissions: When you use the form on our FAQ / Contact Me page, your information is encrypted and routed directly to our secure inbox (hello@gregpeary.com). This is used only to reply to your inquiry.

Data Storage & Retention

We do not maintain a marketing database. Your contact information is never automatically added to a subscription newsletter or placed in a public registry. Furthermore, our system is configured to automatically trim and purge click-log data on a regular cycle, ensuring that interaction records do not persist indefinitely.

Your Rights & Permanent Restrictions

We fully respect and honor your right to digital privacy, restriction of processing, and permanent data erasure. If you have previously submitted a message through this site and wish to have your correspondence permanently deleted from our records, you may send a formal instruction to hello@gregpeary.com. Upon receipt, your personal data will be manually and permanently purged from our systems immediately, without delay or friction.