Privacy Policy

This site is a personal publication. It has no accounts, no logins, no comments, and no shopping basket. The short version of this policy is that it collects very little, and none of it identifies you.

The short version

• No cookies are set by this site.
• Nothing is stored in your browser’s local storage.
• No advertising networks and no social media trackers run here.
• Two analytics tools are in use, both cookieless: one self-hosted, one from Ahrefs.
• Your IP address is never stored by either of them.
• Some links to retailers are affiliate links, marked as such below.

That is why there is no cookie banner. Consent is required for storing or reading information on your device, and this site does neither.

Analytics

We run GoatCounter, a self-hosted, open-source analytics tool. It lives on the same server as the site, so the data is never sent to a third party and never leaves our control.

For each page view it records:

• The page address you visited
• The referring address, so we can see whether you arrived from a search engine, a link, or directly
• Your browser and operating system, in broad terms
• Your device’s screen size band
• Your country, derived from your IP address at the moment of the request
• The time of the visit

It also records when someone clicks a link to a retailer, so we can tell which articles are useful.

To count returning visits within a day without identifying anyone, GoatCounter creates a one-way hash from your IP address, your browser’s user agent string and a secret that is rotated every 24 hours. Your IP address itself is discarded immediately and never written to disk. Because the secret changes daily, the hash cannot be used to recognise you tomorrow, on another site, or by anyone who obtained the data.

There is no cookie, no persistent identifier, and no way to reconstruct an individual’s browsing from what is stored.

Ahrefs Web Analytics

Alongside GoatCounter we run Ahrefs Web Analytics, a third-party analytics service. Unlike GoatCounter it is not hosted here, so your browser makes a request to Ahrefs when a page loads, and Ahrefs sees your IP address at that moment in order to serve the response.

Ahrefs states that the tool is cookie-free and that it collects no personal data. It reports the same shape of information as GoatCounter: pages viewed, referring sites, and broad location and device categories, in aggregate.

It sets no cookie on your device, which is why it does not change the consent position described above. If you would rather it did not run, any content blocker or tracker-blocking browser will stop it, and nothing on this site depends on it.

Server logs

The web server keeps standard access logs, which include IP addresses, for the ordinary purposes of diagnosing faults and identifying abuse. These are kept for a limited period and are not used to build any profile of visitors.

Affiliate links

Some articles link to products on Amazon and other retailers. Where they do, those are affiliate links, and a qualifying purchase earns this site a small commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate links are marked with a disclosure on the article, and they carry rel="sponsored" so search engines can identify them.

Clicking one takes you to the retailer, whose own privacy policy then applies. Those links carry a tracking parameter identifying this site as the referrer, and the retailer may set its own cookies once you arrive - eBay does so through the eBay Partner Network, and Amazon through the Amazon Associates programme. You can clear or block those cookies in your browser at any time; doing so has no effect on this site.

We do not receive your name, address, or payment details, only anonymous aggregate statistics about orders.

Product recommendations reflect genuine opinion. A commission does not buy a recommendation.

Embedded content

Some articles embed video from YouTube, but nothing is loaded from YouTube’s player until you ask for it. What you see initially is a thumbnail image and a play button. The thumbnail comes from YouTube’s image server, which sets no cookies.

Press play and the player loads, at which point YouTube may set its own cookies and collect data according to Google’s privacy policy, over which we have no control. If you never press play, that never happens.

Fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to Google’s servers to fetch them.

What we never do

• We do not sell, rent, or share your data with anyone.
• We do not run advertising networks or behavioural retargeting.
• We do not attempt to identify individual visitors.
• We do not ask for, or store, your name, email address, or any account details, because there is nothing here to sign up for.

Your rights

Because nothing stored identifies you, there is generally no personal data to access, correct, or delete. If you believe otherwise, or you have any question about this policy, get in touch and we will deal with it.

Residents of the UK and EU have rights under the UK GDPR and GDPR respectively, including the right to complain to a supervisory authority. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Children

This site is not aimed at children and does not knowingly collect any information from them.

Changes to this policy

If what we collect changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top is updated.