Privacy Policy

Nothing's Off The Table is published by LMJ Productions, 7 Parrish Pond Lane, Southampton, NY 11968, United States, represented by Louis Ruggiero Jr.. For anything in this policy, write to lj@nothingsoffpod.com. For data protection law, LMJ Productions is the controller of the information described here.

This policy covers this website. It does not cover YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Instagram, TikTok, X or Zoom, which are run by other companies under their own policies, even when you reach them from a link here.

• We hold what you send us in a form, and nothing more.
• There is no database behind this site. Messages arrive as email, and the contact details you gave us are kept with our email provider so we can answer you and remember you if you write again.
• Analytics only run if you say yes. Nothing non-essential loads before you answer, and no is as easy as yes.
• We have never sold or shared personal information for money or for advertising, and we do not intend to.
• If you tell us anything about your recovery, we treat it as health information and ask before we use it for anything.
• Ask us to delete what we hold and we will, then confirm it. Write to lj@nothingsoffpod.com.

Everything this site collects is listed below. Where the law calls for a legal basis, it is named. Where a field is optional, it is optional in the form too.

We do not ask for, and do not want, your date of birth, your address, your financial details, any government identifier, or anything about your health beyond the one optional recovery question on the guest form. Please do not send those. If you send them anyway, we will delete them.

This section is the consumer health data disclosure required by Washington's My Health My Data Act, and it applies to everyone, not only to residents of Washington.

The guest application has one optional field asking how long you have been in recovery. If you fill it in, and if what you write in your message describes addiction, treatment, relapse, mental health or anything similar, that is health information about you and several laws treat it as a protected category.

What we do with it

• It is used for one thing: deciding, with you, whether being on the show is a good idea, and preparing for the conversation if it is.
• It is read by Louis and by the producer. Nobody else.
• It is never used to advertise to you, and never passed to an advertiser, a sponsor, a data broker or an analytics tool.
• It is never combined with analytics. Google Analytics is never told what you wrote in a form.
• We do not sell it. We will not sell it. Under Washington law selling consumer health data requires your signed authorisation, and we do not intend to ever ask you for one.
• We do not use it to make any automated decision about you. A person reads every application.

Where it is held

In the same place as any other email: our inbox, and the servers of our email provider on the way there. It does not go into a database, a spreadsheet, or a customer system, because there are none.

Your say over it

You can withdraw your consent, ask what we hold, or have it deleted, at any time and for any reason, by writing to lj@nothingsoffpod.com. Withdrawing consent does not undo a conversation that already happened, but it stops any further use and we will delete what we still hold. There is no penalty and it will not affect how you are treated.

We are not a doctor's office, a clinic, a treatment provider or an insurer, and we are not a HIPAA covered entity. That means HIPAA does not protect what you send us. It is a reason to be careful about what you send, not a reason for us to be careless with it, and this section is how we say what we do instead.

Nothing on this site is medical, clinical, psychiatric or legal advice, and nothing you send through it creates a treatment relationship or a duty of care. If you are in immediate danger, call 911. If you are in crisis in the United States, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Do not use a form on this site to tell us about an emergency: nobody is watching the inbox around the clock.

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, which are the two things the California laws are most concerned with. Under those laws we have disclosed no personal information for money or for anything else of value in the last twelve months, and we have no plans to.

The companies below process information because they run part of this service. Each is bound to use it only on our instructions.

Two things are deliberately not on that list. The typefaces this site uses are served from our own domain rather than fetched from Google, so no request for a font tells Google that you were here. And the episode players load from youtube-nocookie.com only after you press play, which means that if you never press play, YouTube receives nothing about your visit.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, to respond to a lawful request from an authority, to establish or defend a legal claim, or to protect someone's safety. If that ever happens we will tell you unless we are forbidden from doing so.

We are in New York and so are our providers, so if you write to us from the UK, the EU or anywhere else, your information travels to the United States. The United States does not have an adequacy decision covering transfers generally.

For those transfers we rely on the data processing agreements we hold with the providers above, which incorporate the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK Addendum, and, where the provider is certified under it, on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK extension. You can ask us for the details of the safeguards that apply to you and we will send them.

Different laws grant different rights to different people. Rather than make you work out which set applies to you, we extend all of the following to everyone who writes in.

• Know and access. Ask what we hold about you, where we got it, why we have it and who has seen it, and get a copy.
• Correct. Have anything wrong about you put right.
• Delete. Have what we hold erased. We will do it unless a law requires us to keep something, in which case we will tell you which and for how long.
• Portability. Get what you gave us in a form you can take elsewhere.
• Object and restrict. Tell us to stop, or to pause, a use that rests on our legitimate interests.
• Withdraw consent. Take back consent for analytics, or for anything you told us about your recovery, at any time. It costs you nothing and changes nothing else.
• Opt out of sale, sharing and targeted advertising. There is nothing to opt out of, because we do none of them, but the right stands and we honour a Global Privacy Control signal from your browser automatically.
• Limit the use of sensitive information. Tell us to use anything you said about your recovery only for the purpose you gave it for.
• No retaliation. Using any of these rights will never affect how you are treated, what you are charged, or whether you can be a guest.

How to use them

Write to lj@nothingsoffpod.com and say what you want. There is no form to fill in and no account to create. We will normally answer within 30 days, and always inside the time the law allows us, which is one month under UK and EU law and 45 days under California law. We will tell you if we need longer, and why.

We may need to check you are who you say you are before we hand over or delete anything, which usually means replying from the address you originally wrote from. We ask for as little as possible to do it. Somebody may act for you as an authorised agent if they give us written proof you asked them to.

If we say no

If we refuse a request you can appeal it by replying to our answer and saying so. A person will look at it again and give you a written decision with reasons. If you are still unhappy, you can complain to a regulator: in the UK the Information Commissioner's Office, in the EU your national data protection authority, in California the California Privacy Protection Agency or the Attorney General, and in New York the Office of the Attorney General. You are also always welcome to tell us first at lj@nothingsoffpod.com, and we would rather you did.

New York's SHIELD Act requires reasonable safeguards for the private information of New York residents, and the measures below are what we consider reasonable for a site of this size that holds no database.

• The whole site is served over HTTPS, and it sends browsers a set of hardening headers.
• There is no database and no admin login to this site, so there is no store of submissions to breach.
• Form submissions live in email accounts protected by strong, unique passwords and two-factor authentication.
• Guest applications are read by two people and are not forwarded on.
• Forms are rate limited and carry a honeypot, to keep abuse down without putting a puzzle in front of someone asking for help.
• Access to the hosting and email accounts is limited to the people who need it.

No system is perfect and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach affects your information we will tell you and the relevant regulators as quickly as the law requires, and we will tell you plainly what happened rather than in the language of a press release.

• Enquiries and applications: kept while a conversation is live and for up to two years afterwards, as email and as a contact record with our email provider, so we remember someone who wrote in before. Deleted sooner if you ask.
• Analytics: 14 months, then deleted by Google.
• Server logs: a short retention period set by our host, measured in weeks.
• Your cookie choice: 12 months, then we ask again.

This site is not directed to children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. The forms are for adults: please do not use them if you are under 18.

We are not going to put an age wall in front of the episodes. Someone young enough to be worried about a parent, or about themselves, should be able to read and listen without being stopped at the door. But if you are a parent or guardian and you believe your child has sent us something, write to lj@nothingsoffpod.com and we will delete it.

The only mail this site sends you is about something you did: a confirmation that your message arrived, and our reply to it. There is no newsletter and no marketing mail at present. Every mail we send carries our postal address, as United States law requires. If a mailing list is added later this policy will be updated before it opens, and joining it will be something you ask for rather than something that happens because you once wrote in. If you would rather we did not write back at all, say so at lj@nothingsoffpod.com.

If we change this policy in a way that affects your rights, we will change the date at the top, say what changed, and ask for your cookie choices again where the change calls for it. We will not quietly widen what we do with what you have already given us.

Questions, corrections, or a request to delete: lj@nothingsoffpod.com, or write to LMJ Productions, 7 Parrish Pond Lane, Southampton, NY 11968, United States.