Privacy Policy

Last updated: February 24, 2026

The Tao Path (followthetao.com) is an independent educational website about Taoist philosophy. This page explains what information is collected when you visit, how it's used, and what rights you have. We've tried to write this in plain English rather than legal boilerplate, because the actual situation is simple and you deserve a clear account of it.

Who we are

The Tao Path is an independent website, not a company or a data business. We don't sell products, subscriptions, or services, and we have no interest in collecting personal information about our visitors. Our business model, such as it is, involves earning small commissions when visitors buy books through our Amazon affiliate links.

Analytics

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to understand how our site is being used. Cloudflare's analytics product is deliberately privacy-first: it sets no cookies, collects no personal data, and does not fingerprint browsers or devices. What we can see is purely aggregate — things like how many page views a given article received, the general geographic region of visitors (at the country level), and what kinds of devices or browsers people are using. We cannot identify individual visitors. We cannot link page views to people. This data helps us understand which articles are most useful and how people navigate the site, nothing more.

Cookies

We set no first-party cookies. We don't use tracking cookies, session cookies, or any cookies that would allow us to identify or follow individual visitors. Cloudflare, as the infrastructure provider for this site, may set technical cookies for CDN performance and security purposes — these are operational necessities that have nothing to do with tracking you for marketing.

Google Fonts are loaded from Google's servers. This means your browser makes a request to Google's infrastructure when you visit our site, which is subject to Google's own privacy policy. If you prefer not to have any connection to Google's servers, browser extensions like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger will intercept these requests.

Affiliate links

Several pages on this site contain affiliate links to books on Amazon. Clicking one of these links takes you to Amazon's website. Once you're on Amazon, Amazon's own privacy practices apply — including whatever tracking Amazon does as a matter of standard operation. This is no different from what happens any time you visit Amazon by any route. We have no visibility into what Amazon collects from you after you click through. For details, see Amazon's privacy policy.

Third-party services

The third-party services involved in running this site are:

That's the complete list. We don't use advertising networks, social media tracking pixels, remarketing tools, or any other third-party data services.

Your rights

Because we don't collect personal data, there's nothing for us to delete, correct, or provide access to. If you have concerns about privacy on this site, or if you believe we've omitted something important from this policy, please contact us and we'll respond promptly. We don't sell data — we don't have any to sell.

Changes to this policy

If we make changes to this policy, the date at the top of this page will be updated to reflect when the change was made. We don't anticipate significant changes — the site's relationship with data is straightforward and we intend to keep it that way.