Privacy Policy
KnowSips is a reading site with no accounts, no comments, no newsletter, and no shop. There is very little for it to collect, and this page says exactly what there is.
The short version
- Accounts
- None. You cannot register, log in, or leave a comment.
- Cookies we set
- None. KnowSips sets no cookies of its own.
- What we ask you for
- Nothing. Reading the site requires no details from you.
- Advertising
- None. No ad network, no affiliate tracking.
- Selling data
- Never. There is no data sale, and nothing to sell.
- Third-party requests
- Two: web fonts and an icon stylesheet. Both see your IP address.
If you read only one section, read third parties your browser contacts. It is the part most sites leave out, and on KnowSips it is the main thing that happens.
What we collect
KnowSips does not ask you for your name, your email address, or any other personal detail in order to read it. There is no sign-up form, no newsletter box, and no comment field.
Two things do reach us.
What you send on purpose
If you email the editors, we receive whatever you put in that message: your email address, your name if you sign it, and the content itself. We use it to reply and nothing else.
What the web server records automatically
Like any website, requests arrive at a web server and standard server logs may record:
- the address of the page requested, and the time of the request;
- the IP address the request came from;
- the browser and operating system reported by your device;
- the page that referred you, if your browser sent one.
These are operational records. They exist to keep the site running and to investigate faults or abuse, and they are not used to build a profile of you.
Hosting and page resources
KnowSips runs on Hostinger and uses Cloudflare to deliver and protect the site. These providers process requests containing your IP address, browser details and the requested URL so that they can serve the page.
Fonts and icons are served from KnowSips itself. We host copies of the typefaces and Phosphor icons locally, so displaying a page does not require your browser to contact Google Fonts or the unpkg delivery network.
The text, layout, photographs and navigation also load from this domain. Following a link to another website sends a separate request to that website.
Analytics
No analytics service is configured. No visit-tracking script is loaded and no analytics cookie is set. We do not currently count visits at all.
This paragraph is not a promise written once and left to rot: it is driven by the same setting that would switch a tag on. If analytics is ever enabled, this section changes with it automatically, and the cookies section above stops being true and will be corrected in the same change.
What happens when you search
The search box sends your term to our own server, which matches it against the article text and returns results. The term is used to run that query and is not stored against you, not linked to an identifier, and not sent to any third party.
Your search term does appear in the page address while you are on the results page, which means it can end up in your own browser history and in our standard server logs alongside the request. If you would rather it did not, browse from the drinks index instead of searching.
How we use what we have
- To serve pages and keep them loading correctly.
- To investigate errors, broken links, and abuse.
- To reply to a message you chose to send us.
That is the complete list. We do not profile readers, personalise content, or measure you against other visitors.
Nothing on this site changes according to who is reading it. Two people opening the same guide at the same moment see the same page, in the same order, with the same links. There is no recommendation engine, no A/B test running against you, and no reason for the site to know anything about you in order to work.
Why we are allowed to hold it
If you are somewhere with data protection law of the European kind, the legal bases are these, and the list is short because the processing is:
- Server logs
- Legitimate interests: running the site, diagnosing faults, and defending it against abuse. A site cannot be operated or secured without a record of the requests made to it.
- Email you send us
- Legitimate interests, in answering a message you chose to send. We use your address to reply and for nothing else.
- Measurement or advertising, where in use
- Consent, gathered through the prompt described above, and withdrawable in the same place. Nothing of that kind runs before consent is given.
We do not rely on legitimate interests to justify tracking, profiling, or advertising. Where consent is the correct basis, consent is what we ask for.
Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control
Some browsers send a Do Not Track header or a Global Privacy Control signal to say you do not want to be tracked or to have personal information sold or shared.
The site behaves the same way whether you send one or not, because it does not track readers across sites and has nothing to sell or share in the first place. There is no setting here that a signal could usefully change.
Where a third-party service is in use, that service handles such signals under its own policy, which is linked in the section above. Blocking third-party requests in your browser is the more reliable control, and it costs you nothing on this site: the guides are served from our own server and do not depend on anyone else's script to be readable.
How long anything is kept
- Server logs
- Kept only as long as they are useful for operating and securing the site, then rotated out by the host.
- Email you send us
- Kept while the matter is open, and after that only if it records a correction we made to an article.
- Anything else
- There is nothing else. No profiles, no analytics history, no marketing database.
Your choices and rights
Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or restrict the use of personal information a site holds about you, and to object to certain processing.
Here is the honest practical position: KnowSips holds almost nothing about you. With no accounts and no tracking, there is usually no record tied to you at all beyond a server log line and any email you chose to send. If you contact us, we will tell you plainly what we have, and delete what we can.
Named in full, the rights people most often have are to be told what is held, to get a copy of it, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to how it is used, and to receive it in a portable form. On a site with no accounts, most of those resolve to the same short answer: there is a server log line and, if you wrote to us, your email. We will say so plainly rather than send you a form.
Requests go to the address at the foot of this page. We do not require you to prove your identity for a request we can answer without doing so, because asking for identification in order to confirm we hold nothing would collect more about you than we started with.
If you are not satisfied with how a request was handled, you can complain to the data protection authority for the country you live in. You do not need our permission to do that and you do not need to come to us first.
You can also reduce what reaches us without asking anyone: block third-party requests, use a private window, or browse rather than search.
Security
The site is served over an encrypted connection. Because there are no accounts, no payments, and no stored personal records, the amount of information that could be exposed is very small by design, which is the strongest protection available to a site like this.
No website can promise perfect security, and we do not.
Children
KnowSips is a general reference and is not directed at children. It does not knowingly collect information from anyone, of any age, beyond the server logs described above.
Visitors from outside our country
The site can be read from anywhere. A request you make will be handled by our hosting provider's servers and by the third-party services listed above, which may be located in a different country from you, with different data-protection law.
By using the site you accept that your request is handled in that way. Given how little is collected, the practical exposure includes request information processed by our hosting and delivery providers and the server logs described above.
Changes to this policy
If what the site does changes, this page changes in the same edit. A meaningful change moves the last reviewed date at the top, which is stored once and shown on every trust and legal page so the six cannot disagree.
We will not quietly add tracking and leave this page describing a site that no longer exists.
How to reach us
Privacy questions go to editors@knowsips.com, or through the contact page. Related reading: our terms of use and our disclaimer, which together set out what the site is and is not.