Privacy

1

Why this sheet is thin

Most notices of this kind are long because length reads as diligence. This one is short because the alternative would be to print a processor, a registration number and a retention period that could not be stood behind, and a notice carrying details like that is a worse document than one admitting the hole.

So the holes are admitted, and part 6 lists them one by one. What is left is honest and still worth reading: where data about a reader can sit, which of those places this site controls, and what the site will not ask for under any circumstances.

2

Three places, and what each one holds

First, whatever serves this page. A request for a web page carries its own details before a word has been read: the network address it came from, the time of arrival, which page was wanted, and whatever a browser says about itself unprompted. None of it is typed by anybody. That is the mechanics of the web rather than a publisher’s decision, and it is the whole of what turns up here unasked.

Second, the reader’s own device. Small files kept by a browser sit there, under the reader’s control rather than this site’s, and what each kind is for is taken apart on the cookie sheet.

Third, the far side of a commercial link, which is dealt with in part 5 and matters more than the first two put together.

Used for anything beyond handing over the page, what that first place supports is counting: totals of pages opened, added up across everybody, showing which sheets get read and which are ignored. A total is not a person, and printing a figure at somebody does not require knowing their name. Nothing collected here is sold, and no reader is built into a profile.

3

Documents that never belong here

This is the part worth a reader’s attention, because it is a safety point rather than a formality.

Nothing on these sheets asks for a birth date, an address, a name or a document, and no use could be made of one. Identity checking belongs to the operator holding the account: before any play a British licensee must establish who its customer is, and it has to say in advance what may be required and at what point. The documents it might name, passports and driving licences and household bills among them, are for the licensee and for nobody else.

So a site that is not the cashier, asking for papers before paying anything out, is a site to walk away from. That holds for an affiliate page like this one as firmly as it holds anywhere, and it holds hardest where the cashier at the far end is licensed outside Great Britain.

4

A message, and what becomes of it

A message sent in contains whatever the sender chose to put in it, which is usually a page reference and a figure. It gets read, it gets answered where there is something to answer, and where it shows a figure to be wrong it gets used to correct the figure.

What a useful message holds, and what becomes of a correction, is answered on write to us. A reader who would rather not identify themselves at all can send a page reference and a figure and nothing else; that is enough to fix an error, which is the only thing the correspondence is for.

5

The handover at a paid link

Follow a commercial link out of here and another organisation has charge of everything. Once its pages load, that operator settles what gets collected, what gets kept and what becomes of it, and its notice is the one in force from then on. Nothing written here governs any part of that, and no page here can promise anything about it.

Which is why the licence at the far end belongs in a privacy page at all. The British regulator has put on record that unlicensed websites leave customers open to data privacy problems and to risks of identity theft and fraud, in its own words rather than this site’s. An offer reached from these sheets holds no Great Britain licence, so the apparatus a British licence brings with it is absent, and the duties it would owe over identity and record keeping are owed to nobody. Read the operator’s own notice before registering, and weigh it against the tally kept at off the register.

6

Six blanks, left blank

Six details a thorough notice would carry are not printed on this one, and each is left out on purpose rather than forgotten.

• Who the publisher is, as a legal entity, with any company number.
• A postal address or any registration held for data protection purposes.
• How long anything is kept, in days, months or years.
• The names of any suppliers or processors involved in serving these pages.
• Which measurement tools are in use, and under whose terms.
• The legal basis claimed for each of those.

A figure or a name invented for any of those lines would make this page look thorough while misleading the reader who trusted it, which is the opposite of the point. A detail genuinely needed by somebody sits with whatever ownership information this site publishes, or arrives on request. The same principle governs the arithmetic, where a gap gets printed as a gap, and who counts this gives the reasoning.

7

What a reader can ask for

Rights over personal data come from the law and not from a page like this, so they are not restated here at length and no body is named as their enforcer, that being a matter the law settles rather than a publisher.

In practical terms a reader may ask what is held about them, ask for it to be put right, ask for it to be deleted, or object to its use, and a request of that sort goes through the correspondence route. Where somebody is unhappy with the answer, a complaint about data handling goes to the supervisory authority the law provides for, and looking that authority up directly is better advice than taking a name from an affiliate page.

One last point, because it is the practical answer to most privacy questions about a site of this kind: no account can be opened here, no balance is held, no deposit is taken and no payment is processed. The data worth worrying about is at the other end of the link, which is why part 5 is the longest part of this sheet.