Privacy Policy

This page covers the newsletter signup and the analytics cookie on Paths Are Many — what we collect, why, who else sees it, and how to change or remove it. If anything here is unclear, write to us at privacy@pathsaremany.com.

What we collect, and why

When you sign up, we ask for your email address and, optionally, which continents, countries, teachers or traditions you'd like to hear about. That's everything — no account, no tracking of your visits, no profile beyond the choices you explicitly make on the signup form.

Two separate systems, on purpose

Your email address, your consent record and the sending itself are handled by Brevo (Sendinblue SAS), an email service provider based and hosted in the EU. Brevo confirms your subscription by email (double opt-in) before you receive anything from us, and handles unsubscribing, bounce management and your subscriber status entirely on their end. You can read Brevo's own privacy policy for how they handle that data.

Separately, our own database stores only which content you'd like — the teachers, traditions, countries or continents you selected — linked to your email address. We don't store a subscription status, a confirmation token, or anything about how or whether Brevo delivered an email to you. If Brevo tells us you've unsubscribed or that your address is bouncing, we delete your stored preferences automatically, so they never outlive your consent to have them.

Following specific teachers or traditions

Choosing to follow a specific teacher or spiritual tradition can reveal something about your religious or philosophical beliefs — a special category of personal data under GDPR Article 9. We only store this if you take a separate, deliberate step: checking an unticked box that explains this explicitly, distinct from the general geographic preferences. We record that you gave this consent, when, and which version of the consent text you saw, so a later change in wording never gets applied retroactively to a decision you made under different words.

You did not give this consent just by visiting the site, and it is never assumed or pre-selected on your behalf.

Your choices

Every email we send includes a link to manage your preferences, where you can:

• See exactly what's currently stored for your email address
• Add, remove or change any preference, including withdrawing consent to follow a specific teacher or tradition
• Delete all of your stored preferences, without unsubscribing your email address entirely

To unsubscribe from emails entirely, use the unsubscribe link in the email itself — that's handled directly by Brevo, and it also removes your stored preferences with us. You can also write to privacy@pathsaremany.com at any time to access, correct, export or delete your data — including a full erasure request covering both systems.

Tracking

We do not enable open or click tracking on these emails. We don't know if you've opened an email or which links you clicked.

Cookies & analytics

We use Google Analytics to understand, in aggregate, how visitors use this site — which pages get read, which paths and teachers people explore. It sets a cookie to do this. We don't use it for ads, we don't build profiles of individual visitors, and we don't sell any data to anyone.

If you're visiting from the EU/EEA, the UK or Switzerland, you'll see a short notice asking whether that's okay before the analytics cookie is set — declining is fully respected, and the site works exactly the same either way. For visitors elsewhere, the cookie is set by default, as is common practice; you can still block or clear it any time in your browser's own settings. Google processes this data as described in Google's privacy policy.

Embedded players

Some pages carry players from other platforms — YouTube and Vimeo for films and talks, and Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud or YouTube for audio recordings. Nothing on this site is uploaded or hosted here; every recording stays where the teacher published it, and we link or embed it.

None of those players loads until you click it. Until then the card you see is drawn by this site alone, the platform is never contacted, and it cannot set a cookie or learn that you were here. From the moment you press play you are dealing with that platform as well as with us, under its own terms and privacy policy.

How long we keep it

Your preferences stay in our database for as long as Brevo confirms your address is an active, subscribed contact. The moment that changes — you unsubscribe, or the address hard-bounces — your stored preferences are deleted, not just marked inactive.

Legal basis

Processing your email address and general (geographic) preferences relies on your consent (GDPR Art. 6(1)(a)), given through Brevo's double opt-in confirmation. Processing teacher or tradition preferences additionally relies on your explicit consent to special category data (GDPR Art. 9(2)(a)), given through the separate checkbox described above. You can withdraw either at any time, with no effect on the lawfulness of processing before the withdrawal.

The analytics cookie relies on the same basis, consent (GDPR Art. 6(1)(a)/ePrivacy), for visitors in the EU/EEA, UK and Switzerland, given through the cookie notice described above. For visitors elsewhere, it relies on legitimate interest in understanding site usage.