Great Circle Associates, Inc. (“Great Circle,” “we,” “us”) operates the website at greatcircle.com. This policy explains what information we collect when you visit or interact with this site, why we collect it, and what your choices are.

What we collect and why

Email address

If you submit one of the signup forms on this site — either the form on the Join My List page or the “Join My List” mini-form that appears in the navigation on several pages — we collect your email address. We use it to send you updates about Brent Chapman’s consulting work, upcoming talks, and the book Incident Management for DevOps and SRE. We also use it to send occasional notes on incident management and SRE.

You can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the bottom of any email we send. We will not use your email address for any purpose other than those described here, and we will not sell it or share it with third parties except as described below.

Mailchimp. Email addresses are stored and managed using Mailchimp (Intuit Inc.). When you submit a signup form, your record in Mailchimp is created or updated. We use Mailchimp’s merge fields and tagging features to track which form you came through (for example, to understand whether our audience is finding us through the consulting site or through book-related channels). This information is used for internal mailing-list management only. Mailchimp’s privacy policy is available at mailchimp.com/legal/privacy.

Cookies and analytics

Google Analytics (GA4)

This site uses Google Analytics 4, which sets cookies in your browser to help us understand how visitors find and use the site — for example, how many people visit, which pages they view, and whether visitors are coming from search, social media, or direct links. This information helps us understand what content is useful and how the site is performing as the book launch approaches.

Google Analytics sets cookies named “_ga”, “_ga_*”, and related identifiers. These cookies are not used to identify you personally or to track you across unrelated websites for advertising purposes.

Some details about how we’ve configured Google Analytics:

• IP anonymization: Google Analytics anonymizes IP addresses before they are stored. We do not have access to your full IP address.
• Google Signals: Disabled. We do not use Google Signals, which would associate your visits with your Google account for cross-device reporting.
• Data retention: Both event data and user data are retained for 2 months (the minimum available), after which they are automatically deleted.

You can opt out of Google Analytics tracking using the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on, or by adjusting your browser’s cookie settings. Google’s privacy policy is available at policies.google.com/privacy.

LinkedIn Insight Tag

This site uses the LinkedIn Insight Tag, a small script provided by LinkedIn that allows us to understand the professional characteristics of our site visitors in aggregate — for example, what industries, job functions, and seniority levels are represented. This information appears in LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager as anonymous demographic data and is not linked to any individual visitor’s identity on our end.

The Insight Tag also enables retargeting: if we run LinkedIn advertising campaigns in the future, we can choose to show ads to people who have previously visited greatcircle.com.

The Insight Tag sets cookies governed by LinkedIn’s privacy policy, available at linkedin.com/legal/privacy-policy. You can opt out of LinkedIn’s tracking at linkedin.com/psettings/guest-controls.

Branded short links (grtcrcl.com)

Some links you encounter in emails, social posts, or other materials from Great Circle use the short domain “grtcrcl.com”. These are managed through Bitly, a link-shortening service. When you click a grtcrcl.com link, your request passes through Bitly’s servers before being forwarded to the destination. Bitly may log click data including your IP address, browser type, and the time of the click, subject to its own privacy policy at bitly.com/pages/privacy.

Third-party services we do not use

• We do not use advertising networks or advertising cookies.
• We do not sell or share personal data with data brokers or marketing partners.
• We do not use social media tracking pixels from Facebook or similar platforms.

Changes to this policy

If we make material changes to this policy, we will update the “Last updated” date at the top of this page. We may also note changes in an email to subscribers if the changes are significant.

Contact

Questions about this policy? Email privacy@greatcircle.com.