Privacy Policy

Last updated: 21 August 2026

This page explains what happens to information you give me through polinazueva.com, what is collected automatically while you browse, and what you can ask me to do about it. I have tried to write it in plain language rather than legal boilerplate, because a policy you cannot read protects nobody.

Who I am

This website is run by Polina Zueva, an independent pole dance and Russian Exotic instructor based in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. There is no company behind it and no staff — when this page says “I”, it means me personally, and I am the only person who reads what you send.

You can reach me through the contact form for anything in this policy, including a request to see or delete what I hold about you.

The short version

• I collect what you type into a form, and very little else.
• I do not sell your information, and I do not run advertising trackers.
• No analytics cookies are placed on your device.
• The homepage shows my Instagram posts and some pages show a map, and both of those load from other companies’ servers — details below.
• Course payments happen on Patreon, not here. No card details ever reach this website.

What you send me deliberately

The contact form

The contact form asks for your name, your email address, what you are interested in, and your message. That is emailed to me and nothing else is done with it. It is not added to a mailing list, it is not stored in the website’s database, and it is not passed to anyone. I keep the email for as long as it is useful to have a record of our conversation, and you can ask me to delete it.

Testimonials

If you submit a testimonial, the form asks for your name, your words, and optionally your city, what you trained, your Instagram handle and your email address. Unlike the contact form, this one is stored in the website’s database, because a testimonial is meant to be published.

Nothing you submit appears on the site until I have read and approved it. The tick box on that form is your consent to publish your name, city, training and Instagram handle alongside your words; your email address is never published and is only there so I can reach you if I have a question. You can ask me to take a published testimonial down at any time, and I will.

The newsletter

The newsletter sign-up in the footer sends your email address to Mailchimp (Intuit Inc., United States), which is the service that stores the list and sends the emails. Mailchimp also records the usual mailing-list things — whether a message was opened, whether a link was clicked. Every email has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and unsubscribing removes you from the list. Mailchimp handles that data under its own privacy policy.

Spam filtering

All three forms are protected by CleanTalk, an anti-spam service. To decide whether a submission is from a person or a bot, CleanTalk receives the contents of the submission along with technical signals such as your IP address, your browser, and how the form was filled in. This happens for every submission, including legitimate ones — it is how the check works. Without it the forms would be unusable within a week.

Rate limiting

To stop one person from flooding a form, the site briefly remembers a one-way scrambled version of your IP address for an hour after you submit. The original address cannot be recovered from it, and it is discarded automatically.

What is collected automatically

Analytics

This site uses Google Analytics 4, through the Site Kit plugin, to see roughly how many people visit and which pages they read.

It is configured so that storage consent is denied by default. In practice that means no analytics cookies are written to your device and you are not given a persistent identifier. A measurement signal is still sent to Google when you load a page, and it includes your IP address, your browser and device type, the page you are on and the site you arrived from. Google uses that to produce aggregate statistics, and processes it under its own privacy policy. I see only the aggregate reports — never an individual visitor.

This site does not run advertising pixels, retargeting tags, session recording or heatmap tools of any kind.

Server logs and security

The web server records ordinary access logs — IP address, timestamp, page requested, browser — which are used for security and troubleshooting and are rotated in the normal course of running a server. Cloudflare sits in front of the site as a content delivery network and security layer, so requests pass through Cloudflare before reaching my server, and Cloudflare sees the same technical details for the purpose of serving pages quickly and blocking attacks.

Other companies your browser contacts

Some things on this site are loaded directly from other companies rather than from my server. When that happens, your browser talks to them, and they can see your IP address and browser details in the same way any website you visit can.

• Instagram (Meta Platforms) — the “Follow the Movement” strip on the homepage displays my latest Instagram posts, and those images are served from Instagram’s own network. Loading the homepage means your browser requests images from Meta.
• OpenStreetMap — pages with a map load map tiles from the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s servers.
• Google — the analytics tag described above is loaded from Google’s servers.

Links out to Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Telegram, Patreon and other platforms are ordinary links. Once you follow one you are on their site, under their rules, and this policy no longer applies. It is worth reading theirs.

Cookies

This site sets very few cookies. There is no advertising cookie, no analytics cookie and no cross-site tracking cookie, which is why you are not met with a consent banner — there is nothing meaningful to consent to. The cookies that may be set are the strictly necessary kind: WordPress sets a session cookie if someone logs in to administer the site, and the anti-spam and caching layers may set a short-lived technical cookie to do their job.

If you would like to block even those, every browser has a setting for it. Blocking strictly necessary cookies may stop the forms from working.

Courses and payments

Online courses are sold through Patreon. Clicking a course button takes you to Patreon, and everything after that — your account, your payment details, your card — happens on Patreon under Patreon’s terms and privacy policy. No payment information is ever entered on, processed by, or stored on this website. I see only what Patreon shows a creator about their own supporters.

Private lessons and workshops are arranged directly with me, usually by email or message. Anything you tell me in that conversation — your training background, an injury I should know about, your goals — is used to teach you well and is not shared with anyone.

How long things are kept

Contact emails are kept while our conversation is useful and deleted on request. Testimonials stay up until you or I take them down. Newsletter subscriptions last until you unsubscribe. Server logs rotate on the host’s normal schedule. The scrambled IP used for rate limiting lasts one hour.

How your information is protected

The whole site is served over HTTPS, so what you type into a form is encrypted in transit. Access to the website’s administration is limited to me, protected by a password manager and kept up to date. Outbound email is sent through an authenticated relay rather than plain server mail.

That said, no website and no email system is perfectly secure, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Please do not send anything through this website — or through ordinary email — that would be damaging if it were intercepted.

What you can ask for

Whoever you are and wherever you live, you can ask me to:

• tell you what information I hold about you;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete what I hold, unless I have a legal reason to keep it;
• remove a published testimonial;
• take you off the newsletter.

Use the contact form and I will deal with it myself, usually within a few days. There is no charge and no form to fill in, and asking will never affect how you are treated as a student.

If you are in the United States

Depending on your state, you may have specific rights to know, correct, delete, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information for targeted advertising. I do not sell or share personal information, and there is no advertising technology on this site, so there is nothing for an opt-out signal such as Global Privacy Control to switch off. The rights listed above are available to you regardless.

If you are in the UK, EU or EEA

Students find me from all over the world, so this is worth stating. Where the UK GDPR or EU GDPR applies to you, you also have the right to object to processing, the right to restrict it, the right to receive your data in a portable form, and the right to complain to your national data protection authority.

The legal bases I rely on are: your consent for the newsletter and for publishing a testimonial; legitimate interests for spam filtering, security and aggregate analytics; and taking steps at your request when you contact me about lessons. Because I am based in Florida, information you send me is processed in the United States.

Children

This website is intended for adults and is not directed at children under 13, and I do not knowingly collect information from them. Younger students are taught in person and arranged directly with a parent or guardian, not through this site. If you believe a child has sent me something through this website, tell me and I will delete it.

Changes to this policy

If what the site does changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top will tell you when. There is no history to dig through — the version you are reading is the one that applies.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request about your information, go to the same place as everything else: the contact form. It reaches me directly.

Polina Zueva
St. Petersburg, Florida, United States
polinazueva.com