Legal
Privacy Policy
1. Who we are, and what this covers
ForgeShift Advisory Inc. ("ForgeShift," "we," "us") is a federal corporation incorporated under the laws of Canada, Corporation Number 1782757-1, and is the controller of the information described here. This Policy covers worldclassmanufacturing.ai.
ForgeShift also operates forgeshiftadvisory.com, which has its own policy. The two meet in one place: an address subscribed here joins ForgeShift's single mailing list, described in section 4. Same company either way, and every right in section 8 can be exercised against both by writing to one address.
Questions, access requests, corrections and deletions: [email protected]. Post reaches us at the registered office at the foot of this page.
2. The one thing to read twice
When you enter your email address, we link it to what you had already done on that page before you entered it.
Each page view gets a random identifier, and activity is recorded against it anonymously. Submitting one of the email forms attaches that identifier to your subscriber record, so the whole visit — including what happened before you typed your address — becomes associated with you. We use it to learn which parts of the argument persuade people.
Two limits are also true:
- It applies to that visit, not your history. Page-view identifiers are not stored in your browser and never reused, so an earlier visit is not retroactively linked to you by a signup today.
- It is not cross-site tracking. No advertising cookies, no third-party analytics, no tracking pixels, no fingerprinting, nothing that follows you elsewhere.
3. What we collect, and why
The blueprint is free and needs no account. Nothing below is asked for beyond the fields named in it.
| What | Why | Legal basis | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your email address, at any of the three gates (3.1) | To unlock the "In practice" asides, to serve a part as a PDF, and to subscribe you to the newsletter (4) | Consent | Until you ask us to delete it (6) |
| First name, last name, and firm if you give it — early access only (3.2) | So that a person can decide on your request | Consent | Until you ask us to delete it (6) |
| What you asked for and how you arrived — part, section, which gate, entry-point token | To know which entry points and which sections lead people to ask | Legitimate interest | The life of the series and the analysis of it (6) |
| How this site is read — sections seen, time in view, clicks, window band, country and region (3.3) | To learn which parts of a five-part argument people actually read | Legitimate interest | The life of the series and the analysis of it (6) |
| Agent tool calls — which tool, hashed arguments, timing, what the software calls itself (3.4) | To know how much of the readership is software, and what it asks for | Legitimate interest | The life of the series and the analysis of it (6) |
| Three cookies (5) | To remember an unlock you asked for, and to hold a pre-launch access key | Strictly necessary — no consent required | 180 days |
3.1 The three email gates
Three points ask for an address. Unlocking "In practice" — each section hides one or more asides until you enter one; a single submission unlocks every hidden aside in that part, and a different part asks again. Downloading a part as a PDF — the same, plus the fact that you asked for a PDF, and it unlocks the asides too, so the document you print has no hidden panels. Early access is different enough to have its own subsection below.
At each we record your address, which part and section you were reading, which gate you used, where you arrived from, and whether the request came from a person or from software (3.4). A cookie remembers the unlock (5).
Giving an address is voluntary. Without one the asides stay closed and the PDF is not served; the argument itself is readable in full, and nothing else on this site is withheld.
3.2 Early access — the one form that asks for more
Requesting early access to an unpublished part asks for your first name, last name and email address, and for your firm, which is optional. It asks for more than the other two gates because a person decides on the request, and an address on its own is not something anyone can decide about.
We record those fields, which part you asked for, when, where you arrived from, and whether the resulting notification reached us. We do not record the decision, and this system sends you nothing — your address is not used to deliver the part. Anything that follows is ordinary correspondence between you and a person, kept as described in section 6; a reply you send is read by a person and kept with your record.
The name and firm are not added to the mailing list, which holds addresses and nothing else.
3.3 How we record the way this site is read
This site measures its own use in more detail than a marketing site usually does, because it is a five-part document released over five months and the question it exists to answer is which parts people read. Everything below is sent to our own server, never to a third-party analytics service:
- Which page, part and section you are viewing, and which sheet of the reader.
- How long a section stayed visible. A paginated document has no meaningful scroll depth, so we measure time in view instead.
- Which things you clicked, by a stable name we give the element rather than by screen coordinates — plus where inside that element the click landed, as a proportion of its own size, and your window width in one of four bands. Not a screen recording, and not your screen position.
- Which entry point brought you here — each printed QR code and on-page link carries its own token.
- Whether the request came from a person or from software (3.4).
- Country and region as your network reports them to our host, and the release version of the site. Read from the request, never from anything the page says about you.
This is not cookieless, aggregate-only analytics, and we will not describe it as such. Events are recorded individually against a page-view identifier, and section 2 explains what happens to that identifier when you give us your address.
If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, this measurement does not run at all. No event is sent and no page-view identifier leaves the page. We are not obliged to honour that signal in either jurisdiction we serve, and we honour it anyway.
We do not record what you type before you submit it, we do not record keystrokes, and there are no session replays.
3.4 Software agents, and agent-referred links
This site is built to be read by AI agents as well as by people. When an agent calls one of our tools we record which tool, a one-way hash of the arguments rather than the arguments, how long it took, whether it succeeded, and whatever the calling software says about itself. We also record whether an action came from a person clicking, an agent working alongside a person, or an agent on its own — kept separately from the mechanical fact of how the request arrived, because the first is an inference and the second is not.
If an agent offers you a link to subscribe, that link is unique to the moment the agent asked for it, and signing up through it tells us which agent invocation sent you. An agent cannot subscribe you to anything. Asked to, it requests a link from us instead, and we record the tool call that asked, which part or section it was reading, what the agent calls itself, and an expiry thirty days out. Nothing is subscribed until a person opens the link and submits their own address — at which point your record carries both facts: that a person acted, and that an agent referred them. After thirty days the link still works, it simply stops being attributed.
The same applies to "In practice" content: an agent receives a link to hand you, never the content. An agent cannot pass one of our email gates on your behalf.
6. How long we keep it
What identifies you is kept until you ask us to delete it, and section 8 says how. That covers your address, the name and firm from an early-access request, the requests themselves, and correspondence with us. There is no fixed expiry, because a reader who subscribes at Part I may still be reading at Part V five months later and an address deleted on a schedule is a reader unsubscribed without asking.
Interaction records are kept for the life of the series and the analysis of it. That is the criterion, and it is a longer one than a marketing site would need: the questions worth asking about a five-part document published over five months are long-horizon ones — whether Part I's readers came back for Part V, whether a QR code printed in September still produced subscribers in January. A ninety-day window would delete Part I's launch before Part V shipped, which is why we do not operate one. When the series and the work that follows from it are finished, these records stop serving that purpose and are deleted or anonymised.
The great majority of those records are anonymous — written before anyone gave us an address, carrying no identity to protect. Records connected to an address are personal data, kept for the purpose above, and subject to the deletion right in section 8 without qualification.
7. Who else touches it
We do not sell personal information and do not share it for anyone else's marketing. These suppliers process it on our behalf:
| Supplier | What for | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Hosting and delivery of this site; server logs | United States |
| Cloudflare | DNS and network delivery in front of the host | Global network |
| Supabase | The database holding subscribers, early-access requests and interaction records | Canada / United States |
| Resend | Sending email — the newsletter, unsubscribes, and our internal notice that you asked for early access | United States |
Where your data is held. Between them these suppliers store and process data in Canada, the United States and the European Union. Sending us an address means accepting that it may be handled outside your own country. Write to us for the current details of how a particular transfer is protected.
We may disclose information where the law requires it, or to establish or defend a legal claim. In a merger or acquisition, information covered by this Policy may transfer with the business, subject to this Policy or a successor no less protective.
8. Your rights, and how to use them
Write to [email protected] — from the address you gave us, or from any address, telling us which one to act on. We log the request, act on it, and confirm, within thirty days. There is no fee and no form.
8.1 What deletion does
- Your subscriber record, your early-access requests — including the name and firm you gave — and your correspondence are deleted.
- You are removed from the newsletter.
- The interaction records in section 3.3 are not deleted. The link between them and you is severed and they revert to anonymous records that a page view happened. Your identity is erased; the aggregate history is not destroyed by one person exercising a right.
If you want those records destroyed rather than anonymised, ask for that specifically and we will do it.
8.2 Canada (PIPEDA)
You may ask what personal information we hold, ask for a correction, withdraw consent, and complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
8.3 The EEA and the UK (GDPR / UK GDPR)
You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection, and may complain to your supervisory authority. Where we rely on your consent — the newsletter, and handling an early-access request together with the name and firm you supplied — you may withdraw it at any time, which does not affect the lawfulness of what we did with it before you withdrew.
Where we rely on legitimate interest — understanding how our own publication is read — you may object at any time, and section 3.3 describes a signal that switches that measurement off before you have to write to anyone. We weighed that interest against the disclosure in section 2, which is why section 2 is written the way it is.
Nothing on this site makes an automated decision about you. There is no profiling that produces a legal or similarly significant effect.
9. Security, and children
Database access is restricted to server-side code holding a service credential; there is no public read access and no page on this site can query it directly. Traffic is encrypted in transit. No system is perfect, which is one reason this site asks for as little as it does.
This site is written for people working in manufacturing and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us an address, write to us and we will delete it.
10. Changes, and contact
If we change this Policy we will change the effective date at the top. If a change materially expands what we collect or what we do with it, we will say so in the newsletter rather than relying on you to re-read this page.
[email protected] — questions, access requests, corrections and deletions.
The Terms of Use describe what you may do with the blueprint itself, including the rules for automated access.