What we measure
We count visits to understand which records and guides are useful. This is done entirely by us, on our own server. No analytics company, advertising network or social platform receives anything about you.
When you open a page we record: the page address, the page you arrived from, your screen width, roughly how long the page stayed open, your browser's user-agent string and language, your country, and whether you opened a decision PDF or followed a link away from the site.
Your country is worked out on our own server, using a lookup table we host ourselves. Your address is checked against that table and then discarded. It is never sent anywhere, and we keep the country only, never the city or the address. The table is published by DB-IP under a Creative Commons licence.
The one cookie that identifies a browser
We set a first-party cookie called cbr_v containing a random string such as 7f3a91c0d5e28b64, and a short-lived one called cbr_s for the current visit. The random string lets us tell a returning reader from a new one. It is not linked to your name, your email, or anything you have ever typed here, and it never leaves our server.
If you arrive from an advertisement or a tagged link, we also set a cookie called cbr_src that records which advertisement or campaign it was. It lasts ninety days. Its only purpose is so that, if you later send us a message, we can tell which link brought you here and stop paying for the ones that bring nobody. It holds no information about you, and like everything else here it stays on our own server and is sent to nobody.
Turning tracking off from the button below stops all three of these cookies.
What we never collect
- Your name, unless you type it into the contact form yourself.
- Your IP address in readable form. It is converted to a short irreversible fingerprint, used only to stop abuse.
- Anything at all through advertising or social-media trackers, because we load none.
Turn it off
One click and this browser is excluded from everything above. We also honour your browser's Do Not Track setting automatically.
If you write to us
The contact form takes text only and accepts no attachments. Messages are stored outside the public web directory and are readable only by us. We keep your email to answer you and for our corrections record, and we never share or publish it.
Other things that touch your browser
- Fonts load from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address for that request under Google's privacy policy.
- Our web host keeps standard server logs for security and deletes them on its own schedule.
Questions go through the contact form.