Privacy Policy

Effective 19 August 2026. This policy describes what beacongcr.org collects, why, and what we do not do.

Who we are

Beacon Institute for Global Catastrophic Risk is a Delaware nonprofit nonstock corporation and a 501(c)(3) public charity (EIN 35-2944556). We are the party responsible for the data described below. For any question about this policy, or to make a request about your own data, email .

The short version

We run a brochure website and a contact form. We use privacy-preserving analytics that set no cookies and build no profile of you. We do not sell data, we do not run advertising, and we carry no third-party marketing or social trackers. The only personal information we hold is what you choose to type into the contact form and send us.

We work with people in a field where confidentiality sometimes matters a great deal. If you would rather not use this website at all, email is a fine substitute, and so is the post.

Website analytics

We use Plausible Analytics to count visits. Plausible is an independent, EU-hosted analytics service chosen specifically because it does not require us to identify visitors. It sets no cookies, stores no IP addresses, and does not track you across other websites.

Each page view records: the page address, the referring website if there is one, and a coarse browser, operating system, device type and country. Country is derived from your IP address at the moment of the request; the IP address itself is discarded and never written to storage. There is no identifier that persists between your visits, which means we can tell you how many people read a page and cannot tell you which people.

We also record when a visitor clicks a link that leads off this website — for example to a donation platform or an external document. What is recorded is that a link to a given address was clicked, not who clicked it.

We use this to understand which parts of the site are useful and which are not. That is the whole purpose.

The contact form

If you submit the form on our contact page, it collects the name, email address, subject and message you enter and emails them to our administrative address. The content then lives in our email system for as long as we need it to answer you and to keep a reasonable record of our correspondence. We do not add you to a mailing list from a contact form submission.

The form sets one cookie, a standard session cookie, used solely to limit how often the form can be submitted from a single browser. It is a spam control, it carries no information about you, and it expires when you close your browser. It is not used for analytics or advertising.

You are welcome to email us directly rather than use the form, and to tell us as little as you like.

Server logs

The site is hosted on DreamHost. Like effectively all web hosting, it maintains standard server access logs, which typically record the requesting IP address, the time, the page requested and the browser's user agent string. These logs are created and retained by our hosting provider under their own arrangements rather than by us, and we use them only for security and troubleshooting.

What we do not do

Third parties

Three organisations necessarily handle data on our behalf: Plausible for the aggregate analytics described above, DreamHost as our web host, and Google Workspace as the provider of our email. Pages that link to an external donation platform will say so on the page itself; following such a link takes you to that platform, where their privacy policy applies rather than ours.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, export or delete personal information we hold about you, and to object to its processing. We extend these rights to everyone who asks, regardless of where they live, because drawing the line anywhere else would be more work than simply honouring the request.

Email and we will respond within 30 days. In practice the only personal information we are likely to hold is contact-form correspondence, since the analytics described above cannot be traced back to an individual — which also means that if you ask us to delete your analytics data, we have nothing to delete and no way to find it.

Children

This site is intended for adults working in or funding research. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect, we will change this page and move the effective date at the top. Material changes will be noted on the page rather than made silently.