Privacy and cookies

What actually loads when you open a page

Every page on this site is a plain HTML file. Opening one fetches the page itself, one stylesheet, one small icon file, and any illustration on that page. All of them come from this domain. Nothing is requested from another company, which is unusual enough to be worth stating precisely.

• No web fonts. The typefaces here are whichever ones your device already has, chosen from a list in the stylesheet. No font is downloaded from a font service, so no font service learns that you opened this page.
• No scripts. There is no JavaScript on this site at all. No tag manager, no consent platform, no chat widget, no A or B testing tool.
• No analytics. No page view counter, no heat maps, no session recording, no visitor identifier of any kind. We genuinely do not know how many people read a given page.
• No advertising. No ad network, no retargeting pixel, no conversion tracking, and no affiliate links, as set out in how this desk works.
• No embeds. No videos, maps, social buttons or comment systems, all of which would quietly hand your visit to a third party.

Cookies

This site sets none. Not a necessary one, not a preference one, not an anonymous one. Since no cookie is set, there is no consent to collect, nothing to store against you, and no banner to dismiss. If your browser shows a cookie for this domain, it did not come from these pages.

What a web server records anyway

Being honest about privacy means describing the part nobody can switch off. Any web server, including the one delivering this page, receives the technical details needed to answer a request: the address of the file you asked for, the internet address your request came from, the date and time, and the identifying string your browser sends about itself. That happens at the level of the connection, before any page is involved, and it happens on every website you have ever visited.

We do not read those logs for audience measurement, we do not join them to anything else, and we hold no other record that could be matched against them. They exist because a server cannot answer a request without receiving one.

No accounts, no messages, no lists

There is no login, no newsletter, no comment box and no contact form on this site, so there is no database of readers and no mailing list. We cannot email you, because we have no way to obtain an address. Nothing you type into a search engine to arrive here reaches us either.

This also means there is no data to export, correct or delete on request, because none was ever gathered. Where privacy law gives you rights over personal data held by a website, those rights are satisfied here in the simplest possible way: there is nothing held.

Links to other sites

Every link inside a guide points to another page on this site. That is a deliberate editorial choice rather than a privacy measure, but it has a privacy effect worth naming: reading here does not hand you off to anybody, and no page can be used to pass an identifier along to a third party.

Changes to this page

If any of the above ever stops being true, this page changes first and says so plainly, with the date in the byline updated. A site that starts measuring its readers should say so in the same size type it used when it said it did not.

This page describes how the site is built. It is not legal advice, and it does not attempt to summarise privacy law in any particular country.