Privacy

The short version: this is a plain website. No accounts, no newsletter, nothing following you around and no cookies from me. (An episode page embeds a YouTube player, which is Google's and is described below.) There's a visitor counter, run by Cloudflare, that stores nothing in your browser; it's described below. There is exactly one place you can send me something, the agreement a guest signs before recording, and if you never use it, and never email me, I never learn anything about you personally.

What I collect

Nothing you type, except on the signing page. The search box runs entirely inside your browser. The index is a file your browser downloads, and your search words are never sent anywhere. Everything else on the site is a page to read. The signing page is the exception, and it gets its own section below.

No cookies from me. The one thing this site stores in your browser is your dark/light preference, kept in local storage on your own device. It never leaves it, and clearing your browser data removes it. (Press play on an episode and YouTube's player stores its own things from that point on, which is Google's; see further down.)

Signing the agreement

This is the one part of the site that keeps a copy of something you typed, and it keeps it on purpose. An agreement nobody can produce afterwards is not an agreement, and that cuts both ways: your copy is the one that proves what you agreed to.

What it asks for: your full name, your address, your email, and your name typed a second time as your signature. Two ticks: that you have read the agreement, and that you are 18 or over. That is the party block of the document itself, and nothing has been added to it.

What gets recorded with it: the moment you pressed the button, taken from the server's own clock rather than your computer's, the IP address the signature came from, and a fingerprint of the exact wording you signed. Those three are what make it evidence rather than a form submission, and they are printed on your copy so you have them too.

Where it goes: the site builds the signed agreement as a PDF and writes it to Cloudflare's storage, on this site's own account, before anything is sent. Then two emails go out through Amazon SES, from show@matewishkey.com: one to me with the PDF on it, and one to you with the same PDF. Nobody else is copied, and it is not in any other system.

How long I keep it: as long as the recording it covers is published, and afterwards for as long as I would need to be able to show what was agreed. That is longer than anything else on this site keeps anything, and it is the reason the page asks for so little. You can ask me what I hold and I will send it to you.

The spam check. A public form with no guard on it fills up with junk within a day, so the signing page carries Cloudflare Turnstile. It's a "prove you're a person" check that usually asks you to do nothing at all. It loads the first time you touch a field on that one page. Read the page and never type in it, and nothing about it ever runs. It isn't set up to leave a pass cookie on your browser, it isn't advertising, and it isn't used to follow you anywhere; what it does is Cloudflare's, under their privacy policy.

What the host sees

The site is served by Cloudflare. Like every web host, it processes the technical details of a request (IP address, browser type, which page, when) to deliver the page and to protect against attacks and abuse. That processing is Cloudflare's, under their privacy policy. I don't get a copy of it and it isn't used to build a profile of you.

Analytics

There is a counter, and it is Cloudflare's. Every page loads a small script from Cloudflare that records the visit: which page, roughly where in the world, what kind of browser. It's how I know whether anybody is reading this.

It puts nothing in your browser: no cookie, no local storage, nothing to delete. I've checked that rather than taken their word for it. It doesn't have a profile of you, it can't follow you to another site, and I can't see individual visits, only totals. What Cloudflare does with the request at their end is theirs, under their privacy policy.

Being straight about how this got here: it was switched on for the whole domain on the day the site first went live, and this page said there was no analytics at all until 9 August. That was wrong, and it was wrong because the script is added by Cloudflare rather than by me, so it isn't in the site's own code where I'd have seen it. It's described here now because it's here.

Email

If you email contact@matewishkey.com I have your email address and whatever you wrote, which is unavoidable, because that's how email works. I keep it while it's useful for replying to you and for running this site, and I don't sell it, rent it or add it to a mailing list. Mail is hosted with Google Workspace.

If you send me a wish and it ends up written up as an episode, I'll describe the wish, not who sent it, unless you've told me you're happy to be named.

Other people's sites

Links out to YouTube and Twitch are ordinary links. They learn nothing about you until you click one, and once you're there, you're on their terms and their privacy policy.

An episode page shows a picture of the episode, and nothing is requested from YouTube until you press play. The picture is served from here. There is no player on the page, no Google script and no cookie of theirs, so opening an episode page and reading it tells Google nothing at all. Press play and the real player is put on the page at that moment, which is the point where you have chosen to watch something.

The home page shows when a show is on air, and your browser does not ask YouTube that either. This site's own server asks, once a minute for everybody, and the page asks the server. So the strip at the top can say the show is live without a single visitor being introduced to Google to find that out. It says nothing at all if the answer is no, or if the check fails.

This has moved twice and the current answer is the careful one. Until 10 August 2026 it worked exactly as it does now; for one day the player was loaded on arrival instead, and this page said so; since 11 August the picture is back. If you read this page on 10 August and it told you Google was contacted on arrival, that was true that day.

Once you press play it is on youtube-nocookie.com, their version that does not set advertising or tracking cookies. Be clear about what that does and does not mean: from the click on, Google knows you are watching, the same as if you had opened the video on their site. Every episode is also on the channel anyway, where you are on their terms regardless.

Two other companies are involved, and only because of the signing page: Cloudflare, whose spam check runs on it and who serves this whole site anyway, and Amazon Web Services, whose email service carries your signed agreement to my inbox. Both are described above, and the inbox it lands in is the Google Workspace one further up. Nobody else gets any of it.

Your rights

Australian privacy law gives you the right to ask what personal information is held about you, to ask for it to be corrected, and to ask for it to be deleted. In practice the only things likely to be held are an email you sent me and, if you have been on the show, the agreement you signed. Write to contact@matewishkey.com and I'll deal with it. An email is one message and takes a minute. A signed agreement is not: it is a record I keep on purpose, for as long as described above, and deleting it is something to talk through rather than something I can do without a word.

If you're unhappy with how that's handled, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

Who I am

I'm one bloke, writing as Mate Wish Key, in Brisbane, Australia. The site is operated by Mergodon Pty Ltd, and that company is the one legally responsible for the handful of personal information described above, and I'm the only person who reads the email. Questions about this page go to contact@matewishkey.com.

Changes

If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it. There's no version history, so if something here matters to you, the honest advice is to check back rather than assume.