Privacy notice

The short version: we measure which articles get read, we do not use cookies to do it, we do not run advertising trackers, and the only personal data we hold is the email address of anyone who chose to subscribe to the newsletter or send us a message.

Why there is no cookie banner

Analytics here are first-party and anonymous. When you load a page we record the page path, the referring website's domain, a rough device type, and the time. To count returning visitors within a day without identifying you, we combine your IP address and browser user-agent with a secret that rotates every 24 hours, hash the result, and store only the hash.

That hash cannot be reversed to an IP address, and because the secret changes daily the same visitor produces a different value tomorrow. We never store your IP address, and we set no analytics cookie, which is why UK regulations do not require us to ask for consent.

What we store, and for how long

Data	Why	Kept for
Page path, referring domain, device type, timestamp	To know which articles are worth writing more of	13 months
Daily visitor hash (not reversible)	To count readers rather than page loads	13 months
Reading time and scroll depth on an article	To tell a genuine read from a bounce	13 months
Newsletter email address and name, if given	To send you the newsletter you asked for	Until you unsubscribe
Contact form name, email and message	To reply to you	24 months

Cookies we do set

One, and only if you sign in to the admin area — a session cookie that keeps you signed in. There is no admin area for readers, so in normal use this site sets no cookies at all.

Who else sees your data

Nobody, with two narrow exceptions. Newsletter emails are delivered through our email provider, which necessarily processes your address in order to deliver the message. And where we use the Claude API to help draft or edit editorial copy, only that copy is sent — never reader data, never your email address, never anything from the analytics tables.

We do not sell, rent or share personal data. We do not run third-party advertising or social tracking pixels. Fonts are served from this site rather than a font CDN, so loading a page does not tell anyone else that you visited.

Affiliate links

Some links to retailers earn us a commission if you buy something. Those links are marked, and clicking one takes you to the retailer, whose own privacy policy then applies. Commission never affects a score or a verdict — see our editorial standards.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or object to how we use it. In practice that mostly means the newsletter list and contact messages, because the analytics data is anonymous and cannot be linked back to you even by us.

To make a request, email [email protected]. If you are unhappy with our response you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.