Privacy
Last updated 21 October 2026
In short
THE MOAT has no reader accounts, sets no cookies for readers and sells nothing. It keeps as little as it can, for as short a time as it can. The only personal data it holds is the email address of people who subscribe to THE MOAT Daily.
The website
Pages are served by Cloudflare. Visits are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics and with Fathom Analytics. Both are cookieless and neither tracks people across sites. The footer shows Fathom's totals of visits: the past 24 hours, 31 days and year.
Links go straight to the original publishers. What happens on their sites is governed by their own privacy policies.
When you follow a link to a publisher, the page tells THE MOAT which link it was, and THE MOAT adds one to that link's count for the day. Nothing about you is sent or kept: no cookie, no identifier, no address, no time of day. The counts show which publications THE MOAT sends readers to; they never decide what appears on the page.
THE MOAT Daily (email)
To subscribe you give your email address and tick a box to say you want THE MOAT Daily. THE MOAT records when you did, under which version of this policy, and where you signed up (the page, or another site’s address). You confirm by email before anything is sent.
You may also tell us your first name, the kind of work you do, the topics you follow and where you are based. All optional, changeable or removable at any time from the link in each issue, and used only to understand, in aggregate, who THE MOAT is useful to.
Emails are sent through Amazon Web Services (Amazon SES, in Stockholm, Sweden), which processes your address only to deliver them, and reports deliveries, bounces and spam complaints back to us.
There are no tracking pixels and opens are not measured. Links in the email pass through moatpost.com on the way to the original, which counts clicks per link and day and notes that you followed a link in that edition, not which one (kept 180 days). The link tells the publisher THE MOAT sent you. If you answer “Was this useful?”, we keep your answer; after 180 days it is no longer linked to you.
To stop abuse, signups are counted per network address for an hour under a code that changes every day; a similar code is kept with your signup record for 90 days. The address itself is never stored.
Unconfirmed signups are deleted after 7 days. When you unsubscribe (one click, from any issue), your address and details are deleted after 30 days; the record of your consent stays, with only a scrambled code (a hash) of the address. If an address bounces permanently or reports spam, only that hash is kept, so it is never emailed again.
From the preferences link in any issue you can download everything we hold about you, or delete it at once. Only the people who run THE MOAT can see individual records, and every access to them is logged. We never sell, rent or share subscriber data, or use it for advertising. Questions or requests: [email protected].
The MCP server (for AI agents)
Requests come from the AI assistant you use, not from you directly. THE MOAT does not receive your conversation, only the tool call (for example, a topic to look up).
Queries and arguments are used to answer the request and are not stored.
To keep the service fair, each caller is counted for rate limiting under a code derived from its network address with a secret that changes every day. The address itself is never stored, and the counts are deleted within minutes.
THE MOAT keeps daily totals per tool and per kind of client software (for example “claude” or “openai”): number of calls, empty results, errors and response time. Nothing in these totals identifies a person.
Your assistant
The assistant you connect (ChatGPT, Claude or another) handles your conversation under its own privacy policy.
Contact
Questions or requests: [email protected].