Privacy policy

Last updated: 13 October 2015

We take your privacy very seriously.

Here (in plain English) are full details explaining what information our site collects from you and what happens to it after that.

What information do we collect?

Like every other website on the Net, our site is hosted on a web server (a powerful computer at our ISP) that keeps a log of all the pages and graphics it serves and where it sends them to. This information is essentially anonymous and statistical (it tells us how many people from Iceland looked at our site last Thursday), but it doesn't tell us anything personal about them. We don't know who those people were, whether they were fishermen or fighter pilots, or what colour socks they were wearing at the time.

The logs don't tell us who you are or where you live—but they do record your IP number (a number that uniquely identifies your computer). They also note how much information you downloaded, the operating system and browser you're using, the date and time of your visit, how you came to our site, and so on. None of this information is personally identifiable. We can figure out some things about what computer 12.34.56.78 was doing at 5am on Thursday, October 5 2007, if we really want to, but we don't know who that computer belongs to—and frankly we've got much better things to do with our time.

How do we use this information? We view the access logs in a very general way using a statistical package called AWStats. (If you're really interested, you can see a demo of the kind of statistics that we can see.) What do they tell us? If we know certain pages are unpopular, we can improve them or discontinue them. If we know our server is about to crash because too many people are looking at our global warming page again, we can get a bigger server. If we know our RSS feeds are growing in popularity, we will start to update them more often. This is the kind of thing we do with our logs.

Cookies

European Law requires that we inform you of how our website uses cookies (small files stored on a web browser). As of October 2015, our website does not store any cookies itself or use any third-party services (advertising, social media, or analytics) that use cookies.