A note about the instruments
What the House measures.
This page first describes House application telemetry. We collect first-party website telemetry to understand visits, story engagement and media playback, and to find technical problems. The private Observatory belongs to Dustin Braun.
Events can include the page path, content revision, build ID, time, coarse reading milestones, visible engagement intervals, advancing playback time, media errors, external link origins and allowlisted campaign tags. Referrers are reduced to their origin. URL query strings, page text, names, emails and jar submissions are not included in telemetry.
A random session ID is held in session storage in this browser tab and may carry across page navigation. After 30 minutes without an event, a new page navigation starts a new ID. The House application does not create a persistent cross-session visitor ID or fingerprint. A network address is necessarily processed to deliver requests and used transiently for abuse throttling; the application does not retain it in telemetry. Infrastructure providers may keep separate operational logs.
Raw telemetry and health counters are logically limited to 30 days. Physical cleanup runs when ingestion or owner reports are requested. Collection starts when this instrumentation is enabled; earlier visits are not reconstructed. This release has no long-term aggregate archive.
Global Privacy Control and browser Do Not Track disable the telemetry script. You can also opt this browser out below. This preference uses local storage; private browsing, a different browser, or clearing storage may reset it. Opting out prevents future event collection by this browser; it does not identify or erase prior anonymous events.
We also count requests to public HTML pages at the server, so non-JavaScript crawlers can appear separately from browser engagement. We retain only a recognized agent family or “unclassified,” its classification evidence, the requested page path, time, status and referrer origin. Agent names are declarations, not verified identities.
The owner can mark a browser with a signed, HTTP-only 30-day classification cookie. It grants no account access. Owner-enrolled connection signatures use a server-secret HMAC of the exact public network address, expire after seven days, and are not visitor identifiers. Raw addresses are not stored. A shared network match may include other people; cellular addresses and VPNs can change. The public opt-out also sets a preference cookie so server request telemetry can honor it.
Hosting security is separate
Cloudflare helps deliver and protect the House. It may add browser security checks, process browser and network information, and set security cookies such as __cf_bm and cf_clearance. These are separate from House engagement telemetry and can apply even when a page needs no JavaScript to display its content. Security behavior can vary by page and request.
The House telemetry opt-out, Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track controls described above govern House application telemetry; they do not disable Cloudflare security processing or cookies. Application retention limits and identifier statements above do not describe Cloudflare’s separate processing. See Cloudflare’s privacy policy and security cookie information.
The House’s music, stories and films work with telemetry disabled.