Zach Vorhies

Privacy Policy

Last updated: November 6, 2026

This policy explains what personal information zachvorhies.com collects, why we collect it, who else sees it, and what you can do about it.

Who we are

zachvorhies.com is the personal site of Zach Vorhies, a former Google and YouTube engineer turned whistleblower. It publishes documents, articles and commentary, and it also runs a small scheduling service (the "Service") used to book meetings - free or paid - including the AI Bootcamp at /ai and sessions booked through /meet/.

What we collect

  • Booking details. When you book a meeting you give us your name, your email address and, for meeting types that send SMS reminders, your mobile number. We also store the meeting type, the start time and time zone, any answers or notes you provide to booking questions, and a token that identifies your booking.
  • Payment status. If you pay for a session, PayPal processes the payment. We receive only the outcome (paid or unpaid) together with a transaction reference. We never receive or store your card or bank details.
  • Technical data. Ordinary server logs record the IP address, browser user agent, requested URL and timestamps of requests, which our host keeps for security and troubleshooting.
  • Analytics. Some pages load a page-view and click analytics collector operated for this site (panopticon-qq5x.onrender.com) and some pages use PostHog. These record page views and clicks and may set a first-party identifier.

Cookies

We use a small number of first-party cookies: a session cookie for the admin area, and identifiers set by the analytics collection described above. We do not use advertising cookies, we do not run third-party advertising networks, and we do not sell your personal information.

How we use your information

  • To schedule, confirm, remind you about and deliver the meeting you booked, including sending you a Zoom link or arrival details.
  • To email you a manage link so you can view, reschedule or cancel your own booking.
  • To process and verify payment for paid sessions.
  • To answer your questions and requests.
  • To keep the Service working and secure, and to prevent spam and abuse.

If you are in the EU or the UK, we process this information in order to perform our agreement with you (the booking you asked for), for our legitimate interest in running and securing the Service, and to meet legal obligations such as accounting for paid sessions.

Who else sees it

We share only what each provider needs, and we do not sell or rent personal information:

  • Cloudflare and Render - DNS, CDN and hosting for this site and the Service.
  • PayPal - payment processing for paid sessions.
  • Zoom - generating the meeting link for online sessions.
  • Proton - sends email from this site, including booking confirmations and reminders, and hosts the zach@zachvorhies.com mailbox.
  • Google Calendar - the owner's calendar, used to schedule sessions and avoid double-booking.
  • Gmail - the owner's earlier mailbox, read by the Service (read-only) to archive past correspondence with AI Bootcamp customers.
  • Telegram - internal notifications to the owner about upcoming bookings.
  • PostHog and the panopticon analytics collector - page view analytics.

How long we keep it

Booking records, including the name, email address and phone number attached to them, are kept in the Service database for as long as the schedule and your manage link remain meaningful, and paid-session records are kept as long as needed for accounting. Server logs are kept for a short period by our host. Ask us and we will delete anything we are not required to keep.

Your choices

Write to the address at the bottom of this page to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you, to correct it, or to delete it. You can avoid SMS reminders entirely by booking a meeting type that does not ask for a phone number. If you have already booked, the manage link we emailed you lets you cancel.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has given us information, contact us and we will delete it.

Google and YouTube API Services

The video publishing tool used by this site is a private application ("Zach Adams Effect Uploader", Google Cloud project zachadamseffectapp, OAuth client hermes-uploader) that uses YouTube API Services to publish video files to a YouTube channel operated by the site owner. In connection with that tool:

  • It requests a single scope, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.upload, and uses it only to upload videos to the owner's own channel.
  • It acts only on the account that authorizes it. It does not read or collect information about any other YouTube user or channel, and it never connects to a visitor's Google Account.
  • OAuth credentials are stored on the owner's own machine, are never shared, and can be revoked at any time at https://myaccount.google.com/permissions
  • Information obtained through the Google APIs is not sold, transferred or disclosed to third parties, is not used for advertising, is not used to determine creditworthiness, and is not used to train machine learning models.
  • Zach Vorhies's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

This site's use of YouTube API Services is also subject to the YouTube Terms of Service (https://www.youtube.com/t/terms) and the Google Privacy Policy (https://policies.google.com/privacy).

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a material way we will update the date at the top of this page and post the new version at this same URL.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request about your own data: zach@zachvorhies.com