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Privacy

This site counts visits and does nothing else with them. There are no accounts, no forms to fill in, no newsletter, no advertising and nothing is sold or shared. Nothing you read here is reported to anybody who could sell you something.

What is counted, and where it goes

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.

It is the only thing this site loads from another host. Everything else — the typefaces, the map, every figure — is served from here.

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, worked out from your network address to about the level of a town or region.
  • 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. There is nothing here to type into.
  • Anything about you across other websites.
  • Anything passed to a third party, unless you use the feedback form, which is described below.

The feedback form

The tab down the side of every page opens a form. Nothing on this site is collected about you until you use it, and using 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.

One third party is involved, and only in this. The email is delivered by Resend, which handles the sending and therefore sees the message on its way past. Nothing about a reader who does not use the form reaches them, and nothing that Matomo counts is connected to anything sent here.

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 a fourth company loading on every page of this site to protect one form.

Cookies

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.

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.

Not being counted

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

Checking…

The choice is kept in a cookie on this site, so clearing your cookies clears it too.

  • 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.

Asking

There is no account to close and no record to delete: nothing here is attached to a person. If you want to know more about what the analytics hold, or want a visit removed, the author is reachable through colinsmillie.com.

This page describes what the site does today. If that changes, this page changes with it — and the change will be in the repository’s history like everything else here.