You might notice a few small adverts in some parts of this site. The income from these is very small, but as a consequence it’s made me realise that I ought to have some sort of privacy policy… Do of course be aware that this policy applies to this site only: I link to other sites in places, and they may have their own, different, policies.

Posting comments
There are a few places where information is collected by the webserver. The most obvious example is if you add a comment to a post — and it’s always much appreciated when you do! The site asks you to provide a valid e-mail address, your name (which could be a pseudonym), a comment (well obviously!), and gives you the option to include a link to your website, if you have one. Comments are automatically screened by a spam filter, and genuine ones are normally published immediately, together with your name and website address.

Your e-mail address remains private — it’s not published online, but it does stay in the admin interface of my website (which is visible to me only). I might get in touch about your comment, or just to thank you for contributing.

Signing up for e-mail updates
The website also, in places, gives you the option to sign up for e-mail notifications: either letting you know when a new item is posted, or telling you when there’s a new comment on a particular post. If you take advantage of this service, then your e-mail address will be used for this purpose only.

Security of your information
I take as much care as I can to ensure that your personal information is kept secure at all times. In addition, I would never pass your e-mail address to other people (unless required to do so by law, of course).

Visitor analysis
There are also more subtle ways in which information is collected — but nothing especially unusual! Like many websites, I use Google Analytics to give me anonymous, statistical information about people’s browsing activities. This means that information such as your IP address, operating system, web browser, etc are collected by Google on my behalf.

Similarly, the site uses cookies in places to work out which bits of the site you’ve already seen, to make the website work better.

Third-party advertising
Most adverts on this site are provided by Google, as part of their ‘Adwords’ programme. Google use information about your browsing habits on other websites, in order to show you adverts that they think you might find interesting. If you find this a little too big brother-y, you might want to go to their advertising cookie opt-out page: this allows you to stop the adverts on any website from being tailored to your own interests.

I also have a small number of adverts served by Amazon, under their ‘Affiliates’ programme. These adverts select items from the Amazon catalogue that their system thinks might be relevant to the post. Sometimes this works well; sometimes the items it suggests are just comical! Amazon may collect information about your browsing habits to tailor these adverts.

Where information is stored
This website itself is hosted on a server in England. Google Adwords and Amazon Affiliates operate from a number of sites, including some outside the European Economic Area.