Privacy notice

Last updated: 17 October 2026. This notice explains what the Inspector Hoot website, short links and newsletter collect. Inspector Hoot is an AI-generated fictional character; the controller is the real person or business named below.

Who is responsible

Controller: Fabian Bertea, Romania. Contact for any privacy question or request: inspector.hoot.studio@gmail.com.

No cookies, no trackers

This website sets no cookies, uses no local storage for tracking, loads no third-party scripts, fonts or pixels, and runs no analytics service.

1. Short links (for example /r/Ab3xY9k)

When you open one of our short links we count the visit to learn which videos are useful. For each visit we compute a one-way keyed hash of your shortened IP address (the last part removed: /24 for IPv4, /48 for IPv6) and your browser's user-agent string. The key is random, exists only in the server's memory and is replaced every day at 00:00 UTC, so hashes cannot be linked across days.

• Stored: the hash, the time, the link code and a device class (mobile or desktop).
• Never stored: your IP address, your user-agent string, cookies or any identifier on your device.
• Automated visitors (bots, link previews) are not counted. The hash is also used in memory to limit abusive request rates.
• Purpose and legal basis: anonymous audience statistics and abuse protection, legitimate interest (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)).
• Retention: individual click rows are deleted after at most 90 days; only aggregate counts are kept after that (at most 25 months).

When we forward you to another website we add campaign tags (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) that name the video and platform, never you.

2. Newsletter and the free checklist

• What: your email address, chosen language, and a consent record (time and version of the consent text). We do not ask for your name.
• Where: only in our self-hosted newsletter software (listmonk) on our own server in the EU. Emails are sent through Amazon Web Services (Amazon SES), acting as our processor under a data processing agreement, in an EU region.
• Double opt-in: we first send one confirmation email. Nothing else is sent unless you click the confirmation link.
• Legal basis: your consent (GDPR Art. 6(1)(a); Romanian Law 506/2004). You can withdraw it at any time with the unsubscribe link in every email, or by writing to us.
• Retention: until you unsubscribe. Unconfirmed sign-ups are deleted within 30 days.
• Our own statistics record only that "a sign-up happened" with the same daily hash as above, never your email address.

3. Purchases

Payments are handled by our reseller (Merchant of Record) shown at checkout, currently Stripe or Polar. The reseller is the seller of record and processes your payment and billing data under its own privacy notice. It sends us an order notification; before storing it we delete names, email addresses, postal addresses and card details, and keep only the amount, currency, product and order identifiers needed for our accounts (kept 10 years for tax law).

4. Server logs

Our web server is configured not to log IP addresses, user agents or referrers. Error logs contain only technical error types.

Your rights

You can ask for access, correction, deletion, restriction, portability, and object to processing based on legitimate interest. Write to inspector.hoot.studio@gmail.com. Because click hashes change daily and contain no IP address, we usually cannot link click records to you (GDPR Art. 11). You may complain to the Romanian data protection authority (ANSPDCP, dataprotection.ro) or to the authority where you live.

We do not sell personal data, do not use it for advertising profiles and make no automated decisions about you.