Privacy matters but it can be confusing. This page explains our approach to privacy on all our websites and how it affects you.
Short version
A cookie is a small piece of text sent to your browser by a website you visit. It helps the website to remember information about your visit, like your preferred language and other settings. That can make your next visit easier and the site more useful to you. Cookies play an important role. Without them, using the web would be a much more frustrating experience.
- We collect anonymous statistics about your visit, like which of our pages you viewed.
- Some 3rd parties like Google, Facebook and Twitter may know you visited this website, if you use their services. We can’t control them but we don’t believe this knowledge poses any threat to you.
- If you sign up with us we take great care to keep your information safe and we’ll never share it with others without your express permission.
- We never share your data with 3rd parties except to help us deliver our own services.
These are just the key points. If you need detail, keep reading.
Measuring our visitors
We measure visitors to our website using Google Analytics. This records what pages you view within our site, how you arrived at our site and some basic information about your computer. All of that information is anonymous – so we don’t know who you are; just that somebody visited our site.
The information we collect from analytics helps us understand what parts of our sites are doing well, how people arrive at our site and so on. Like most websites, we use this information to make our website better.
Here you can learn more about Google Analytics.
Advertising
Cookies help to make advertising more effective. Without cookies, it’s harder for an advertiser to reach its audience, or to know how many ads were shown and how many clicks they received. You can learn more about How Google uses cookies in advertising
Facebook, Twitter and other social networks
These services provide social buttons and similar features which we use on our website – such as the “Like” and “Tweet” buttons.
To do so we embed code that they provide and we do not control ourselves. To function their buttons generally know if you’re logged in; for example Facebook use this to say “x of your friends like this”. We do not have any access to that information, nor can we control how those networks use it.
Social networks therefore could know that you’re viewing this website, if you use their services (that isn’t to say they do, but their policies may change). As our website is remarkably inoffensive we imagine this is not a concern for most users.
Discussion comments
To allow visitors to discuss our blog articles and some web pages we use a discussion system called Disqus.
To do so we embed code that Disqus provide and we do not control ourselves. Disqus anonymously tracks visitors to pages like we do. They also remember who you are if you login to any Disqus service, so you can comment on any website using their tool.
Logging in to Disqus can be done in many ways, including via Facebook. If you login via social network, Disqus will be able to link your activity to that network. In this way, your Disqus activity may be personally identifiable.
Disqus will know what pages you viewed in our site and what you wrote on those comments. Of course all comments you leave are also publicly visible on the Internet alongside your name, so we do not imagine this is a concern for many people.
Updates to this policy
We may update this privacy policy from time-to-time, particularly as technology changes. You can always check this page for the latest version. We may also notify you of changes to our privacy policy by email.
Any questions?
If you have any questions about this privacy policy or your personal data, please write to us.