Privacy
Privacy notice
You can read every page on this site and download every dataset without an account, without consenting to anything, and without us learning who you are. This page says exactly what is collected in the few cases where something is.
What is not collected
This is the shorter and more useful list, so it comes first. This site runs:
- No analytics of any kind — no Google Analytics, no Plausible, no Fathom, no Matomo.
- No advertising network, no retargeting pixel, no conversion tracking.
- No Meta pixel, no LinkedIn Insight tag, no TikTok pixel, no X pixel.
- No session recording, heatmaps or scroll tracking.
- No browser fingerprinting, and no cross-site identifier of any kind.
- No embedded third-party fonts, videos, maps or comment systems that would see your request.
- No cookie banner, because there is nothing to ask you to consent to.
Nothing about you is sold, rented, shared for advertising, or used to build a profile. There is no profile.
Your raw IP address is never written to our database. It is hashed with a secret salt before anything is stored, which means we cannot recover it and cannot match it against a hash held by anyone else.
What is collected
Four things, all of them a consequence of something you chose to do or of the site being served to you at all.
| What | When it is collected | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| A one-way hash of your IP address | On every request, in memory. Written to a row only when you submit a form. | Rate limiting and abuse control. The hash is salted, so it cannot be reversed to an address or matched against a hash from another site. | As long as the submission it is attached to. |
| What you type into the contact or corrections form | When you submit it. | To read the message, act on a correction, and reply if you asked for one. | Until the matter is closed and no longer useful as a record of a correction. |
| Your email address, if you subscribe | When you submit the signup form. | To send the digest you asked for, and nothing else. | Until you unsubscribe. An address that is never confirmed is discarded. |
| Server request logs | On every request, by Cloudflare, who serve this site. | Delivering the page and defending against attack. We do not build reports from them. | Cloudflare’s own retention period. We do not export or archive them. |
Cookies and local storage
A reader is set no cookies at all. The two cookies this site can set belong to the administrative interface and are only issued after an editor signs in. Your theme preference is stored in your own browser's local storage and is never transmitted.
The full cookie table, including what is deliberately absent
The newsletter
Signup is double opt-in. Your address is stored as unconfirmed, a confirmation request is sent, and nothing else is sent until you answer it. An address that is never confirmed is discarded rather than kept "just in case".
The digest carries no tracking pixel and no click-tracked links, so we do not know whether you opened it or what you read. Every message carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing takes effect immediately without asking you why.
Who else is involved
As few parties as the site can be run with:
- Cloudflare — hosting, the database, the cache and asset storage. They see the requests that reach the site because they serve them.
- An email delivery provider — used only to send the newsletter and its confirmation request, and given only the addresses that subscribed.
There is no third party that receives data about you for its own purposes, and no data broker, enrichment service or advertising partner in the chain.
Children, in both senses
This site is a reference work for adult researchers and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect anything from a child.
Separately, and more importantly: this site holds no identifying information about the children whose cases it discusses. There is no field in which such a thing could be stored. That is a matter of architecture rather than policy, and it is explained in full on the ethics page.
Your rights
Under the UK and EU GDPR, and under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, you may ask for a copy of what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be erased, object to its processing, or withdraw consent you have given. Where you subscribed, consent is the basis and you can withdraw it at any time; where you sent a message, the basis is our legitimate interest in answering it.
In practice there is very little to ask for. Write to [email protected] and the request is answered within 30 days. We will not ask you to prove your identity beyond what is needed to be sure we are not disclosing someone else's data to you.
If you are in the UK or the EU you may also complain to your supervisory authority; in India, to the Data Protection Board.
Security
The site is served over HTTPS only, with a strict content-security policy, and it loads no third-party scripts. The administrative interface uses opaque session tokens, and administrator passwords are stored only as salted PBKDF2 hashes — they cannot be read back, including by us.
Changes and law
If this notice changes in a way that affects what is collected, the change is described on this page rather than made silently. This notice and the operation of this site are governed by the law of India.