Privacy & Data

The Water of Life is a community archive. Every observation in it was offered freely by someone who wanted their experience to exist in the record. This page explains how that record is kept — by a real person, not a platform.

Who keeps this archive

My name is Ana Seahawk. I am the founder, steward, and sole data controller for this archive. There is no organization, no team, no automated pipeline. I read every submission. I care for the record personally. If you have a question, a concern, or a request about your data, you are talking to me.

Contact: anaseahawk.com

What is collected

When you submit the observation form, the following is collected:

• Your practice pathways, duration, and frequency
• What you observed
• Your overall experience
• What else was happening (concurrent factors)
• Any additional details you chose to share
• Your display name, if you provided one (otherwise anonymous)
• Your email address, if you provided one
• Your age range, if you provided it

Some of this information constitutes health-related data under data protection laws (including GDPR, where it applies), including observations about your body and any mention of medications or treatments. You choose what to include. The only required fields are the observation itself, the concurrent factors section (which can be a single sentence), and the consent checkbox.

The legal basis for processing your data is your explicit consent, given through the consent checkbox on the observation form. For health-related data specifically, this relies on GDPR Article 9(2)(a) — explicit consent for specified purposes.

Email addresses are entirely optional and are never published.

If you provide your email, your observations are linked together privately. This means you can come back over weeks or months, add new observations, and build a record of what you notice over time. On the public archive, your entries appear anonymously (or under your chosen display name) — but behind the scenes, they are connected, so if you ever want to see your full record, request a correction, or ask for removal, I can find everything that is yours. Your email is stored only in the private archival record and is visible only to me.

For audio interviews, the conversation is recorded. The recording is used solely for transcription and is never published.

What becomes public

Your observation — the formatted version of your submission — is published in a public GitHub repository and displayed on this website. It becomes part of a collective record that anyone can read and learn from. It includes:

• Your display name (or anonymous if none provided)
• Your age range (if provided)
• Your practice details, observation, concurrent factors, and any additional details you chose to share

If you contribute more than once using a display name, your observations are naturally visible as an ongoing record — a person’s journey with this practice over time. That kind of longitudinal view is one of the most valuable things this archive can hold, and it belongs to the community.

The following are never published:

• Your email address
• Audio recordings from interviews
• Any information you explicitly ask to keep private during an interview

How submissions are processed

Form submissions are processed through Formspree, a third-party form service. When you submit the form, your responses pass through Formspree’s servers and are delivered to my email. Formspree’s own privacy policy applies to that transmission: formspree.io/legal/privacy-policy.

Once received, I read your submission and lightly edit it for clarity and consistency with the archive’s format. Your words and meaning are preserved — the editing is for structure and readability, not content. I keep your original submission as a permanent private archival record. The edited observation is what appears on the site.

After the observation is published, I delete the raw submission from Formspree and from my email. Your original is preserved privately as part of the archive’s permanent record.

Audio interview recordings are stored privately on my own devices, used only for transcription, and deleted once the transcript has been reviewed and approved by the contributor.

Who has access

• Me — I am the only person who sees raw submissions, email addresses, and audio recordings
• Formspree — processes the form submission during transmission (it does not see the published observation or the private archive)
• The community — sees only the published observation on the site

How long data is retained

• Published observations remain in the archive indefinitely. Because the archive uses Git version control, the history of changes is preserved even after an observation is modified or removed — the Git record will show that it existed and was changed or removed, though the content itself is removed from the current version
• Original submissions are kept as permanent private archival records. They are never published. If you request removal, both the published observation and the private original are removed
• Audio recordings (from interviews) are deleted after the transcript is reviewed and approved by you
• Raw form submissions in Formspree and email are deleted after your observation is formatted and published

Your rights

You can, at any time:

• Request a copy of any data I hold about you
• Request correction of your published observation
• Request removal of your observation from the archive — removals are tracked in the Git history (the record shows an entry was removed, and why) but your content is removed from the current, publicly visible version of the archive
• Withdraw consent — if you withdraw consent, your observation will be removed as described above
• Ask questions about how your data is handled
• Lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority if you believe your data has been handled improperly

For any of these, contact me through anaseahawk.com. I will respond within 30 days.

Cookies and tracking

This site does not use cookies, analytics, tracking scripts, or any third-party monitoring. There is no advertising. The site is hosted on GitHub Pages, which may log standard server access data (IP addresses, request times) as part of its infrastructure — this is outside my control. GitHub’s own privacy statement applies to that: docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies.

Age requirement

Contributors must be 18 years of age or older. This archive does not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.

Changes to this page

If this privacy page is updated, the change will be visible in the archive’s Git history. Contributors whose observations are already published will not be affected by changes made after their submission — your observation was accepted under the terms that existed when you submitted it.

International data transfers

Form submissions pass through Formspree, whose servers are located in the United States. If you are submitting from outside the US, your data crosses an international border during transmission. The published archive is hosted on GitHub Pages, also based in the US. Both services maintain their own data protection commitments, linked elsewhere on this page.

Last updated: 2026-09-20

Licensing for published observations has not yet been decided. When a licensing model is adopted, it will be documented here and reflected in the contribution form.