The Visualist · Effective October 26, 2026
The short version. We use your email address to send you The Visualist, and a little data about how you read it to make better issues. You agree to that when you subscribe and confirm. We never sell your data, and sponsors never get it. Unsubscribe from any issue and we stop.
The Visualist is published by OK Square, LLC, a company in the United States. We're the controller of your data, which means we decide what's collected and why.
Post: OK Square, LLC, 5965 Stirling Rd, Unit #5039, Davie, FL 33314, United States
Email: [email protected]
Your email address. It's how the issue reaches you.
Your name, if you give it.
Your answer to "What do you make?", if you answer. It tells us which of our readers you are, so we can write for you.
Opens and clicks. When your email app loads an issue's images, or when you click a link in it, we learn that you did. That also reveals your IP address, your approximate location and the kind of device you use.
The dates you subscribed, confirmed and, if you do, unsubscribed. This is our record of your consent.
What you write to us, if you reply to an issue or email [email protected].
That's all. We don't buy data about you or combine it with data from anywhere else.
We use it to send you The Visualist, to see which sections and links get read so the next issue is better and to tell you if this notice changes. Your consent is the legal basis (GDPR Article 6(1)(a)). You give it when you subscribe and click the link in the confirmation email. Everyone confirms, and nobody is added to the list without that click.
You can withdraw it at any time by unsubscribing, and that doesn't affect what we did before.
Two small things rest on our legitimate interest instead (Article 6(1)(f)). We answer the emails you send us. And after you unsubscribe, we keep a short record so we never email you again by mistake.
We never quote you in an issue without asking first. We don't make automated decisions about you.
beehiiv, Inc. sends The Visualist and hosts our archive at read.thevisualist.ai. It handles your data only on our instructions, under a data processing agreement. beehiiv uses other companies for hosting, sending and fraud checks, among them Amazon, Cloudflare and SendGrid; the full list is at subprocessors.beehiiv.com.
Google hosts our inbox, [email protected], through Google Workspace. It only sees what you send us.
No one else. Sponsors never receive personal data. When we tell a sponsor how an issue did, we give totals (how many readers, how many clicks), never names or addresses. We don't sell or rent your data. If we ever recommend another newsletter, you join it only if you choose it yourself, and its own privacy notice applies from then on.
Affiliate links. Some links in the Toolbox and the Technique are affiliate links, labeled "(affiliate link)". If you buy through one, we may earn a commission. The site you land on may set its own cookies and learn that you came from us; its own privacy policy applies there. The label is there so you can choose.
In the United States, by beehiiv and Google. US law doesn't protect personal data the way EU law does. To cover that, beehiiv's data processing agreement uses the European Commission's standard contractual clauses (the EU's model contract for data sent abroad), with the UK and Swiss versions. You can read it at beehiiv.com/dpa. Google handles your emails to us under its own data processing terms for Workspace.
While you're subscribed, we keep it.
When you unsubscribe, we stop sending right away. We keep your email address and the dates you joined and left for up to two years, as proof that you'd agreed and so you're never added back by mistake. Then we delete them.
Emails you send us stay in our inbox for up to two years.
If you'd like any of it deleted sooner, email us.
Email [email protected] and ask us, free of charge, to:
send you a copy of the data we hold about you
correct it
delete it
give it to you in a file you can take elsewhere
stop or limit a use of it
You can also withdraw your consent at any time: every issue has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and it takes one click. We answer within one month. We may ask you to write from the address you subscribed with, so nobody else can ask for your data.
If you think we've got something wrong, tell us first and we'll try to fix it. You can also complain to a data protection authority. In Portugal, that's the Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados (CNPD), cnpd.pt. Elsewhere in the EU, you can go to your own country's authority, and in the UK to the Information Commissioner's Office, ico.org.uk.
The email itself sets no cookies; opens and clicks are measured as described above. Our archive at read.thevisualist.ai runs on beehiiv, which asks before it sets cookies that aren't needed to run the site. We don't run analytics on thevisualist.ai yet.
The Visualist isn't meant for anyone under 16.
If we change this notice in a way that affects you, we'll say so in an issue before the change takes effect. The date at the top shows the current version.