Privacy Policy

Last updated: 26 September 2026

This policy covers two things: this website, and the Groove Folios plugin you can install on your own WordPress site. The short version: this site counts visits with Jetpack Stats, sets no cookies for visitors and shows no ads. The plugin collects nothing and never sends anything to us.

Groove Folios is made by StudioEN (studioen.us). When this policy says “we”, it means StudioEN. You can reach us at groovefolios@studioen.us.

We use Jetpack Stats to see how many people visit, which pages they read and where they came from. It shows us totals and trends, never who you are, and it doesn’t set cookies.

Jetpack Stats, from Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com), records page views, referring sites, search terms, outbound link clicks and country. To do that it receives your IP address, browser user agent, the page URL, the referring URL, the time, your browser language and your country code, plus your WordPress.com username if you are signed in to WordPress.com. Automattic keeps the logs that contain IP addresses and usernames for 28 days and uses them only to produce the statistics. We see only totals, never an IP address or username. See the Automattic Privacy Policy.

This site has no advertising, no newsletter sign-up, no contact form and no comments, and you can’t create an account here. We never ask for your name or email address.

This site doesn’t set cookies for visitors. If you use the light/dark switch, your choice is saved in your browser’s local storage under the key gs-color-scheme. It never leaves your device, and you can clear it at any time from your browser settings.

WordPress sets its own cookies only for the people who run this site, when they sign in to the dashboard. The login page sets a temporary test cookie, which holds no personal data and is removed when the browser closes. Signing in adds login cookies that last two days, or two weeks with “Remember Me”, and are removed on logging out. There are also screen-options cookies that last a year, and a one-day cookie holding the ID of the last post edited.

To load faster, this site’s images and some of its scripts and stylesheets are delivered by Jetpack’s content delivery network, from Automattic’s wp.com servers. Your browser fetches them from there, so those servers receive your IP address and browser details, as with any web request. Automattic states that this service collects no visitor data and tracks no activity.

The fonts on this site (Inter and JetBrains Mono) are served from our own server. No font service is contacted when you read these pages.

Some pages have videos hosted on YouTube or Vimeo. Nothing is loaded from those services until you press play. When you do, the player loads from YouTube (using its privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com domain) or from Vimeo, and that service receives your IP address and browser details and applies its own policy: Google Privacy Policy, Vimeo Privacy Policy.

If you open a folio published on this site, it behaves like a folio on any other site using the plugin, as described below: its fonts load from Google Fonts, and some themes remember your light/dark choice in local storage.

This site doesn’t host the plugin. Downloads come from GitHub and from the WordPress.org plugin directory, and our download links go there. Once you follow one, that site’s privacy policy applies: the GitHub Privacy Statement or the WordPress.org Privacy Policy. Our analytics count clicks on those links, and both sites show us overall download numbers, but we don’t learn who downloaded the plugin.

When you install Groove Folios, you are the site owner and the plugin runs entirely on your server. It has no analytics, usage tracking or telemetry, and it never sends anything to StudioEN. We can’t see your folios, your visitors or your settings. Groove → Settings → Privacy in your dashboard lists every outside request the plugin makes. There are two.

Folio themes use typefaces served by Google Fonts. When someone views a published folio or a folio preview, their browser requests the stylesheet from fonts.googleapis.com and the font files from fonts.gstatic.com. Google receives the visitor’s IP address and browser details, as with any web request. This happens on folio pages only, not on the rest of your site and not in the dashboard. See Google’s Fonts terms and Privacy Policy.

Theme covers and sample content use photos from Pexels. Their licence doesn’t allow them to be bundled with the plugin, so nothing is fetched until an administrator presses Download Photos on Groove → Settings → Imagery. The plugin then downloads the photos from images.pexels.com to your server: 46 requests, about 4 MB in total. Pexels receives your server’s IP address and the addresses of the photos requested, and nothing else. No account or API key is involved. After that, the photos are served from your own uploads folder, so your visitors never contact Pexels. See the Pexels licence, terms and Privacy Policy.

Some folio themes offer a light/dark switch and remember the reader’s choice in local storage (gm-theme in Groove Magazine, gp-theme in Groove Proposal). This stays in the reader’s browser. If you password-protect a folio, WordPress sets its standard wp-postpass cookie after a reader enters the password correctly, so they aren’t asked again for ten days. That cookie holds a hash of the password, not the reader’s identity.

If you run Groove Folios, you decide what your site collects, so your site needs its own policy. If you publish folios, it should mention Google Fonts, and the wp-postpass cookie if you use password-protected folios. You’re welcome to adapt the wording on this page.

We don’t hold anything that identifies you: the analytics we see are totals. Google and Automattic hold the underlying analytics data under their own policies, linked above. If you want us to look into data about you, or you have any question about this policy, write to groovefolios@studioen.us and we’ll answer within 30 days. Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to complain to your local data-protection authority.

If the site or the plugin starts handling data differently, for example by adding another service, we’ll update this page and change the date at the top. Changes to the plugin’s behaviour are also recorded in its changelog on WordPress.org.