This site is a reading archive. It is built to need as little information about you as possible.

What we collect

  • Server logs. Our web server records the page requested, the time, the browser's user-agent string and the IP address, as almost every web server does. These are used to keep the site running and to spot abuse.
  • Visit statistics. We use Clicky, an analytics service, to count visits and see which pages are read and where readers arrive from. It records the page, the referring page, a rough location worked out from the IP address, and the browser and device type. We use it to find pages that are failing readers, not to build a picture of any individual.
  • Nothing else. There is no advertising network on this site, no social media pixel, no advertising identifier and no behavioural profiling. Nothing collected here is sold, and nothing is passed to anyone beyond the analytics service that measures the visit.

Cookies

This site sets no cookie of its own for readers. A session cookie is set only for the editors when they sign in to the private editing area, and it is removed when they sign out.

Clicky may set a cookie of its own, or use similar browser storage, to tell one visit from the next. You can refuse it. Blocking cookies, blocking scripts, or turning on the tracking protection built into most browsers all stop it, and every page here still reads normally with analytics blocked. Nothing on this site is withheld from a reader who blocks them.

What leaves this site

Pages link out to documents and reports hosted by other organisations. Following one of those links takes you to that organisation's site, where their own privacy practices apply.

What a page loads from elsewhere

The text, the stylesheet and every image are served from this site. The one exception is the analytics script described above, which loads from the provider's own servers and so tells them that a browser at your address asked for this page. That is the whole of it. No fonts, no video players, no comment widgets and no share buttons are loaded from anyone else. What Clicky does with what it receives is set out in its privacy policy.

Email

If you write to us, we keep the message so we can reply and, where it produced a correction, so we have a record of why a page changed. We do not add you to anything and there is no mailing list to be added to.

Your rights

How to ask

You can ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be deleted, and ask us to stop using it. Write to the address on the contact page. Because we hold so little, most of these requests are answered in a sentence.

Changes to this page

On 20 September 2026 we added Clicky to measure visits. Before that day this page said the site carried no third-party analytics and set no reader cookie, and that was true when it was written. The change is logged on the corrections page, where it stays, because a privacy page quietly rewritten is worth less than one that shows its own history.

If we add anything else that watches readers, this page is updated before it is switched on and the change is logged in the same place.