The Bots Wrote My Privacy Policy and a Lawyer Friend Said It's 'Technically Fine'

Every website has a privacy policy. Almost nobody has read one voluntarily. Mine was no different — a sad little paragraph from 2017 that said, in essence, "I don't collect anything, please stop asking." It sat in the footer like a fire extinguisher: legally shaped, never touched.

Then one night, while doom-scrolling my own server logs instead of sleeping, I noticed something. My traffic was almost entirely bots. Not the cute kind that index pages for search engines — I mean an entire ecosystem of crawlers, scrapers, vulnerability scanners, and things that identify themselves only as "python-requests/2.28.0" and then ask for a file called /wp-admin/setup.cgi that my site does not have and never will.

Thousands of hits a week. Nobody human. And every single one of them was technically a "visitor."

So I did what any reasonable person running a digital playground with no map would do. I let the bots write my privacy policy.

The Method: Garbage In, Legalese Out

Here's the setup. For thirty days, I logged every bot request that hit myxy554 — the user agents, the requested paths, the query strings, the referrers, all of it. Then I built a small script that parsed those requests into policy language using a simple substitution system:

• A bot requesting /wp-login.php became a clause about "third-party authentication interests."
• A scanner probing /admin/config became language about "administrative data access protocols."
• A scraper with a fake Googlebot user agent became a section on "identity misrepresentation by automated agents."
• Query strings full of SQL injection attempts became, and I quote the final document, "unauthorized input methodologies."

The result was eleven hundred words of privacy policy that no human wrote, generated entirely from the behavior of machines that thought nobody was watching them. Which, if you think about it, is the most honest data collection happening anywhere on the internet.

The Poetry Nobody Asked For

Here's what surprised me: the output reads weirdly beautiful in places. Bot traffic has a rhythm to it. There's the lonely single hit from an IP in Frankfurt that requests exactly one page and leaves. There's the swarm that hits your server at 3:04 AM Eastern — which is 9:04 AM in wherever they're actually calling home — like an alarm clock made of HTTP requests.

One bot requested /[robots.txt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt) forty-one times in a week and ignored it every single time. That became a policy clause about "repeated non-binding communication." A different crawler asked for a file named /backup.zip, which is either the laziest hacking attempt of all time or a bot that genuinely believes everyone keeps a backup.zip in their root directory, like a spare key under the mat.

The best material came from the liars. Bots that claimed to be Googlebot but resolved to data centers in places Google has never heard of. Bots announcing themselves as browsers from 2013. One that identified as "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DefinitelyARealPerson)" — I want to believe that one was a fellow human messing around, and if so: hello, your clause is in section four.

Who Is Scraping a Domain This Small?

This was the genuinely interesting part, and it's the part nobody tells you about running a tiny site. You assume bots crawl big websites. Wrong. Bots crawl everything, indiscriminately, because crawling is cheap and the internet is flat. My domain gets roughly the same automated attention as a mid-size bakery in Ohio. Possibly more, since bakeries don't have publicly accessible logs to poke at.

The scrapers fell into a few recognizable species: AI training crawlers with increasingly apologetic names, SEO tools checking if my site links to somebody's competitor, academic projects abandoned years ago whose scripts are still running like a lighthouse for a town that moved, and outright data harvesters looking for exposed email addresses. (There are none. There have never been any. Keep digging, fellas.)

Reading the logs felt like reading a census of everyone who's ever wanted something from the internet without wanting to be seen doing it.

The Document Itself

The finished policy is live in the footer. It is legally structured, contains the words "data subject," "legitimate interest," and "california residents" — because if you're writing policy for a US audience, you invoke California the way old sailors invoke the sea — and it was authored, clause by clause, by automated visitors who never consented to being co-authors.

I ran it past a friend who went to law school. Her exact review: "This is technically fine and also the saddest thing I've ever read." High praise.

And here's the punchline, the part that makes this a real experiment and not just a bit: in the month since publishing it, the analytics show exactly zero humans have opened the page. The bots, meanwhile, crawl it constantly. The only audience for a document about automated visitors is the automated visitors themselves, reading their own biography back to themselves, one request at a time.

Which is exactly the point. Privacy policies were never written to be read. They were written to exist, to occupy space, to absorb attention without earning it. My bots' privacy policy does all of that — and unlike the human-written ones, it's at least an honest portrait of who's actually in the room.

The logs are still running. Section twelve writes itself every night around 3 AM.