Privacy

Nothing about you is collected until you do something. Reading is counted; writing is not read by anyone but the author.

• A visit, as described in section 2. Not attached to a name, because there is no name to attach it to.
• Whatever you type into the feedback form, if you use it, and the page you were on. Described in section 4.

There is nothing else to fill in on this site. No account, no subscription, no comment box, no search that reaches a server.

Visits are counted by Matomo, open-source analytics running on a server the author of this site runs, at analytics.ideawarehouse.ca. It is not Google Analytics. No advertising network, data broker or social platform receives anything from this site, and the counting does not follow you anywhere else. A Matomo instance only knows about the sites it is installed on.

What a visit records

• The pages you open here, and when.
• The page that sent you, if you arrived from a link or a search.
• Your browser, operating system, rough screen size and language, all of which every browser tells every web server it talks to.
• Your approximate location, to about the level of a town or region. It is worked out from your network address, and then the address is masked before anything is written down: the last part of it is discarded and never stored. So the location is kept and the address that produced it is not.
• Which links you follow away from the site, and which files you download. That is enableLinkTracking, and it is on so the atlas can tell whether readers go on to open the sources it cites.

What it does not record

• Your name, your address, or anything you might have typed. Outside the feedback form there is nothing here to type into.
• Anything about you across other websites.
• Your full network address. It is used for the location lookup in the moment the request arrives and discarded, not held.
• Anything sold, rented or shared with anybody for their own purposes.

Matomo sets two, to tell one visit from the next: _pk_id, which holds a random identifier and expires after thirteen months, and _pk_ses, which marks the current visit and expires after thirty minutes. Both are set for this site only, marked HTTPS-only and SameSite=Lax, so they are not sent when another site links to this one.

The longer of the two outlives what it points at. Records are deleted after thirty days, as section 7 says, so a _pk_id older than that identifies nothing: it is a number with no rows left to join to.

There is no cookie banner. A banner that asks permission and then works either way is theatre, and the honest version of the same thing is a page that says what is set and a button that turns it off.

The tab down the side of every page opens a form, and it is the only way to send anything from here.

What is sent is what you typed, the page you were on, and a screenshot if you attached one. Your email address goes too, if you chose to give one, and it is used to reply and for nothing else. It arrives as an email and is stored nowhere on this site: there is no database behind this atlas, and no log line carries the message.

There is no CAPTCHA on it. Spam is refused by checking where the request came from, by limiting how many arrive from one address in an hour, and by a field a person never sees. All three run on this server. A CAPTCHA would have meant a script from another company loading on every page of this site to protect one form.

Nothing sent through the form is a commercial electronic message and you will not be added to a list. There is no list.

Three ways, any of which is enough. This one takes effect now:

• Turn on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control in your browser. Matomo is asked to respect it.
• Block the analytics host, or use a browser that does it for you. Nothing on this site depends on it. Every page works identically with the counting refused, because the counting is the last thing loaded and nothing waits for it.

• There is no database. Every page is built in advance from files in a repository and served as it was built.
• There are no accounts and no passwords belonging to readers, so there is nothing of yours to leak.
• Every connection is HTTPS, and the policy sent with every page forbids the browser from loading a script, a font or an image from anywhere except this site and the analytics host.
• Feedback is not stored. It is delivered as email and exists after that only in a mailbox.

• The two Matomo cookies expire as described in section 3: thirteen months and thirty minutes.
• Analytics records are deleted after thirty days. Not a year, and not the thirteen months the longer cookie runs for. What remains after that is the count, not the visit.
• Feedback email is kept as long as it is useful to answer or act on, and can be deleted on request.

Three, and each of them only in the way described. None of them receives anything to use for their own purposes.

• Cloudflare sits in front of this site as its network and certificate provider, so every request to it passes through them before reaching the server. Their policy.
• Matomo, self-hosted by the author on Canadian infrastructure, counts visits. It is the only thing a browser loads from another host.
• Resend delivers feedback email, and therefore sees a message on its way past. Nothing about a reader who does not use the form reaches them. Their policy.

The figures on this site come from documents published by municipalities and governments. Those publishers know nothing about you: the atlas reads what they published, and readers never touch them.

There is no account to close and no record to delete, because nothing here is attached to a person. What you can ask for:

• What the analytics hold, and the settings they run under.
• That a visit be removed from them.
• That feedback you sent, and any reply, be deleted.
• To stop being counted, which section 5 does immediately and without asking anybody.

The feedback tab on any page reaches the author, or write to hello [at] @haliburtonatlas.ca. The author is also reachable through colinsmillie.com.

This page describes what the site does today. If that changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. There is no mailing list to announce it on, so the honest substitute is that every revision is in the repository’s history alongside the change that caused it, like everything else here.