Effective 17 September 2026. This page describes what Sidequest collects from visitors and subscribers, why, and who it's shared with. For how referral links and commissions work, see the referral disclosure — this page is about data, not money.
What we collect
If you subscribe to role alerts (/subscribe), we store the email address and category preference you submit, so we can send those alerts. The other direct source is publicly posted professional contact details, described below.
From every visit, we record which role pages are viewed and which “Apply” links are followed, alongside the browser's user-agent string and a short-lived first-party cookie — this is how we tell real applicants apart from automated crawlers, and which roles and platforms are actually working. We don't log full IP addresses against these events or build a profile of individual visitors across sessions.
Outreach to publicly listed professionals
Sidequest occasionally emails professionals whose contact details they themselves published on a public professional forum, such as a Hacker News “Who wants to be hired?” thread, to point them to a listed opportunity that appears relevant to the skills they described. For each person we keep the address, the public post it came from and the date, so the source of every message can be traced.
Every such email carries a link to stop further mail. Opting out is global: the address goes on a do-not-contact list that every Sidequest email checks, and nothing more is sent to it. We do not sell these addresses or share them with advertisers; the providers listed below process them only to deliver that mail. We do not use them for anything other than that outreach.
Cookies
Two first-party cookies, sq_src and sq_cmp, record which site or campaign a visitor arrived from — a short label such as “reddit”, never your email or anything that identifies you. Both expire after 30 days. We don't run third-party advertising or analytics trackers, so there is nothing here to opt out of beyond clearing your own browser cookies.
Who it's shared with
We don't sell or rent personal data, and we don't share it with advertisers. A handful of infrastructure providers process it on our behalf, strictly to run the site:
- Resend — delivers the role-alert emails to subscribers.
- Neon — hosts the database subscriber records and analytics events are stored in.
- Vercel — hosts the site and runs its scheduled jobs, and necessarily processes visitor requests to serve pages.
- Anthropic — generates the editorial content on role and guide pages from public listing data. It never receives subscriber emails or visitor analytics — only the job listing text being turned into a page.
How long we keep it
Subscriber records are kept until you unsubscribe — every alert email includes a one-click unsubscribe link, which removes your address immediately. Role-view and apply-click events are kept in aggregate for reporting on which roles and platforms perform well; they aren't linked back to a subscriber's identity.
Your rights
Email admin@sidequest.expert to ask what data we hold about you, or to have it deleted. We'll act on either within a reasonable time and confirm once it's done.
Children
Sidequest is a board of paid professional work and isn't directed at children. We don't knowingly collect data from anyone under 16.
Changes to this policy
If what we collect or who we share it with changes materially, this page will be updated and the effective date above will move. Questions: admin@sidequest.expert.