Privacy policy

Overview

R Observatory (the “Site”) is operated by HJJB, LLC. This policy explains what information is and isn’t handled when you visit the Site, the legal bases we rely on, and the rights you have. It applies to visitors everywhere, including the European Economic Area (EEA), the United Kingdom, and Switzerland.

Who We Are

The data controller for the Site is HJJB, LLC, a limited liability company formed in Arkansas, United States. For any privacy matter, including exercising the rights described below, contact us by email at jjb@thecoatlessprofessor.com. We do not publish a postal address; email is the controller contact for all privacy requests.

Information We Don’t Collect

The Site has no user accounts and requires no registration. We do not ask for, or directly collect, any personal information from visitors: no names, email addresses, or contact details. The processing described below is carried out by the advertising and analytics services we use, and by our web host’s server logs.

Legal Bases for Processing

We rely on the following legal bases under Article 6(1) of the GDPR. For visitors in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland, advertising and analytics cookies are set only after you consent, because storing or reading cookies requires consent, which is also the legal basis for the processing. We do not rely on legitimate interests for advertising or analytics.

Cookies and Local Storage

The Site uses your browser’s local storage to remember display preferences (such as light/dark theme and page size). These stay on your device, are not sent anywhere, and are not used for tracking, so they do not require consent. Google Analytics and Google AdSense set their own cookies, described below. For visitors in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland, advertising and analytics storage is denied by default and is not written until you consent through our cookie message; the record of your consent choice is stored regardless.

Cookie names and durations are published by Google and may change; the durations above are typical values and browsers may shorten them.

Advertising

The Site displays advertising through Google AdSense. For advertising, Google and its advertising partners each act as independent controllers of the data they collect through the ads on this Site: they set their own purposes and means, which we do not control. Specifically:

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this Site or other websites.
• Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to this and/or other sites on the Internet.

You can opt out of personalized advertising through Google Ads Settings, the Digital Advertising Alliance, Your Online Choices (EEA/UK), or the Network Advertising Initiative. See also how Google uses information from sites that use its services.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics (GA4) to understand, in aggregate, how visitors use the Site. For analytics, Google acts as our data processor, processing data on our behalf under the Google Ads Data Processing Terms. See Google’s Privacy Policy for how this data is handled.

For visitors in the EEA, Switzerland, or the UK, Google Analytics does not retain IP addresses. In Google’s words: “Analytics drops any IP addresses that it collects from EU, Switzerland, or UK users before logging that data via EU, Switzerland, or UK domains and servers,” and IP-address data “is used solely for geo-location data derivation before being immediately discarded.”

We retain Google Analytics user- and event-level data for 14 months; aggregated reports are unaffected by this setting.

International Data Transfers

When you consent to Google Analytics or Google AdSense, personal data may be transferred to and processed by Google LLC in the United States. Google LLC is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, the UK Extension to it, and the Swiss-US Data Privacy Framework, and these transfers rely on the European Commission’s adequacy decision for that framework (Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2023/1795). Google also relies on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses as an additional safeguard. Should the adequacy decision be suspended or annulled, transfers would rely on those clauses and other appropriate safeguards.

Package and Maintainer Information

The Site republishes information that is already public on the two R package repositories it tracks: CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network) and Bioconductor. From both we take package metadata, version history, check results, and the maintainer and author names listed in package DESCRIPTION files. We rely on our legitimate interest in operating a public information service about package provenance.

This information is obtained from those public sources and is not collected from Site visitors. We display maintainer and author names only; we do not display maintainer email addresses. If you are a package maintainer on either repository and would like a correction, or wish to object to this processing, contact us (see below).

Your Data Protection Rights

Where the GDPR (or UK GDPR) applies to you, you have the rights to access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability, and to object to processing based on our legitimate interests. You also have the right not to be subject to solely automated decisions producing legal or similarly significant effects; we carry out no such decision-making. To exercise any of these rights, email jjb@thecoatlessprofessor.com.

Where we rely on your consent (advertising and analytics cookies), you may withdraw it at any time — it is as easy to withdraw as to give. Use the “Manage privacy choices” control in the Site footer to change or withdraw your choices. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out before you withdrew.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority. Because HJJB, LLC is established in the United States with no establishment in the EU, you may contact the authority in your own country; a list is available from the European Data Protection Board. In the UK you may contact the Information Commissioner’s Office, and in Switzerland the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner.

Server Logs

Our web host records standard server access logs when you visit the Site. These may include your IP address, the date and time of the request, the page requested, the referring page, and your browser’s user-agent string. We process this on the basis of our legitimate interest in operating the Site securely, diagnosing problems, and preventing abuse. These logs are written by our infrastructure, not stored on your device, and are retained only as long as needed for security and troubleshooting, after which they are rotated and overwritten.

Third-Party Links

The Site links to external resources such as CRAN, GitHub, and package homepages. We are not responsible for the privacy practices or content of those external sites.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Any changes will be posted on this page with an updated revision date.

Contact

Privacy questions can be directed to jjb@thecoatlessprofessor.com.