Privacy
Proper Tools is based in Brussels and operates under EU data protection law, including the GDPR.
Our privacy posture is simple: we collect very little, and what we collect we treat with care.
What We Collect
Email subscribers. If you subscribe to our newsletter, your email address is stored by Buttondown, our mailing service. We use it only to send you Field Notes. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Contact form and email. If you write to us, we retain your message and contact details for the purpose of responding and maintaining the professional relationship. We do not add you to any mailing list without your explicit consent.
Website hosting. This site is static. We do not run analytics, tracking pixels, or cookies. Our hosting provider may collect standard server logs (IP address, timestamp, page requested). We do not access or process these logs for profiling or marketing purposes.
What We Don’t Do
We don’t sell data. We don’t buy data. We don’t run ads. We don’t profile visitors. We don’t use third-party analytics. We don’t set cookies.
Third-Party Services
We use a small number of external services:
- Buttondown (newsletter delivery)
- Gandi (our DNS provider)
- GitHub Pages (our hosting provider)
- Google Docs (for collaborative document craft)
- Proton (our email provider)
Each operates under its own privacy policy. We choose providers whose practices we consider reasonable, but we cannot govern their operations.
Your Rights
Under the GDPR, you have the right to access, correct, or delete any personal data we hold about you. You also have the right to object to processing and to data portability.
To exercise any of these rights, contact:
We will respond within 30 days.
Data Retention
Newsletter subscriptions persist until you unsubscribe. Professional correspondence is retained for the duration of the relationship and a reasonable period thereafter for legal and continuity purposes.
We do not retain data longer than necessary. We do not archive for the sake of archiving.
Changes
If this policy changes materially, we will note it here with the date of the change.
Last updated: 2026-02-28.
Our principle: collect less → protect less.