The Linux Institute is a small free educational site about Linux. We're a non-commercial project. Our business model is the same as it has always been: produce useful reading and let people unsubscribe whenever they want. No advertising, no analytics, no third-party trackers.
What we collect
Newsletter subscription
If you subscribe to one of the four newsletters (Terminally Online, Deep Tabs, Open Source Security, or The Read), we store your email address and the stream you signed up for, until you unsubscribe. We send you the emails through the same service. That's it. We don't share your email with anyone.
Website logs
Our hosting provider (named in our Terms) keeps access logs the way every hosting provider does — IP address, user agent, the page you loaded, and the response size. These are used to keep the site online and to detect abuse. The default retention period at most providers is 30 days; on this site it is shorter.
Those logs are not connected to your email, your name, or anything else.
Email correspondence
If you write to admin@linuxinstitute.co.za, we keep the thread for as long as it's useful to you and to us, then delete it. We never sell correspondence, share it, or use it to build a profile of you.
What we do not collect
- No advertising cookies.
- No Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, Plausible, Fathom, or any other site-analytics tool.
- No social-share tracking pixels.
- No session recording.
- No fingerprinting, no device fingerprint, no browser fingerprint.
- No sale of personal data. (We don't collect any to sell.)
Cookies
This site sets no cookies. The newsletter subscription form remembers nothing on the client side after you reload the page.
Third-party services we use
- Web fonts (Google Fonts) — when you load any page on this site, your browser fetches fonts from Google Fonts, which means Google can in principle see the request from your IP. This is the standard Google Fonts arrangement. There is no Google-side tracking on this site that we have any way of standing up.
- Newsletter delivery — see the forms. Provider named in the welcome email of each newsletter.
Your rights under POPIA (South Africa) and GDPR (EU/UK)
You have the right to: (a) ask us what we hold about you; (b) ask us to correct it; (c) ask us to delete it; (d) unsubscribe from any newsletter at any time, with one click. To exercise any of these, write to admin@linuxinstitute.co.za. We respond within 7 days.
Children
This site is suitable for all ages. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13. If we discover that we have, we delete it on receipt of a parent's request.
Changes to this notice
If we change anything material about how we handle data, we update this page and bump the version date above. We do not retroactively apply changes without your consent.
Contact
Email admin@linuxinstitute.co.za with any questions about this notice. If we don't answer within 7 days, write to our hosting provider (named in Terms) and we will.