Privacy

Who runs this site

I do. Tom Sharman, reachable at contact@tomsharman.com. If you have a question about your data, that is the address.

The newsletter

When you sign up, your email address and the page you signed up on go to Beehiiv, the service that sends the weekly email. That is all I ask for. Every email has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and one click takes you off the list.

Sign up forms, and the booking form, use Cloudflare Turnstile to keep bots out. It checks your browser, not you, and sets no tracking cookies.

Booking a session

To book a Power hour I need your name, your email, what you want from the hour and the time you picked, plus your channel if you choose to add it. Payment goes through Stripe, in Stripe's own form, so your card details never touch this site. Once you have paid, the booking goes into my Google Calendar and you get an invite with a Google Meet link.

While you are in checkout, the site holds your slot and your email for about 30 minutes, so no one else takes the time and one address can only hold one slot at a time. A booked slot is kept until the day after the session, then deleted automatically.

Enquiries

The enquiry and speaking forms send what you type, the page you sent it from and any campaign tags in the link to my inbox as an email, using Amazon SES, Amazon's email service. Your address is set as the reply-to, so I can answer you. If that ever fails, the form opens your own email app with the message written out instead. The site keeps no copy; the email sits in my inbox for as long as we are talking.

The forms are protected from spam by Cloudflare Turnstile, a hidden field bots fill in and people never see, a check that the form was not sent within seconds of opening, and a limit on how many enquiries can come from one connection in a minute and a day. That count is kept only in memory and is gone within a day.

Ask Tom

Questions you type into Ask Tom are sent to Anthropic's Claude to write an answer from the pages on this site. The site does not log or keep your question or the answer.

To stop the tool being abused there is a daily limit per visitor. That count is keyed to a scrambled version of your IP address (a salted hash, so the address itself is never stored), and it deletes itself after two days. No cookie is set.

Analytics

There are no analytics on the site right now. If I add any, it will be Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies and does not track you across sites, and this page will say so.

Videos from YouTube, Instagram and TikTok

The video pages show players from YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Nothing loads from them until you press play. Once you do, that player comes from their servers and they may set their own cookies, under their own privacy policies.

On your own device

If you pick light or dark mode, your choice is saved in your browser so it sticks. If you close a video tile on the home page, the site remembers that until you close the tab. Neither leaves your device.

Where it is hosted

The site runs on Amazon Web Services. Like any host, it may keep standard request logs for security for a short time.

Your rights

You can ask me for a copy of what I hold about you, ask me to correct it, or ask me to delete it. Email contact@tomsharman.com and I will sort it within a month. To leave the newsletter, use the unsubscribe link in any email. If you are not happy with how I have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.