Privacy and cookies policy

Last updated: 2 April 2020.

Here (in plain English) are full details explaining what information our site collects from you and what happens to it after that.

Briefly:

• We do not routinely use server logging.
• We do not use any analytical or advertising cookies of any kind.
• We may use short-lived, temporary session cookies to help our web server work efficiently.
• We do not track or trace your web browsing in any other way (with beacons, pixels, or any other mechanism).

Logging

Like every other website on the Net, our site is hosted on a web server (a powerful computer at our ISP) that can keep a log of all the pages and graphics it serves and where it sends them to. This information is essentially anonymous and statistical (it tells us how many people from Iceland looked at our site last Thursday), but it doesn't tell us anything personal about them. We don't know who those people were, whether they were fishermen or fighter pilots, or what colour socks they were wearing at the time.

The logs don't tell us who you are or where you live—but they do record your IP number (a number that uniquely identifies your computer). They also note how much information you downloaded, the operating system and browser you're using, the date and time of your visit, how you came to our site, and so on. In theory, none of this information is personally identifiable; in practice, we could figure out some things about what computer 12.34.56.78 was doing at 5am on Thursday, October 5 2007, if we really wanted to, but we don't know who that computer belongs to—and frankly we've got much better things to do with our time.

Most of the time, our serving logging is switched off, so we don't collect or store any information about your browsing sessions. We switch on our server logs only on very rare occasions when there are technical problems with the server that need diagnosing and fixing. We log for as long as we need to to fix the problem, then delete the logs straight afterwards.

Cookies

European Law requires that we inform you of how our website uses cookies (small files stored on a web browser). We do not use advertising, statistical tracking (analytic), or social media cookies of any kind.

Our website may use temporary "session" cookies to help with things load-balancing (efficiently managing the load on our hosting company's web servers). They last only for the duration of your session (usually until you close or restart your web browser).

How can you control your privacy?

If you're concerned about cookies, you can change the options in your Web browser to restrict how websites can use them. You can switch off certain cookies, instruct your browser to keep them only for certain periods, or delete cookies altogether. You can set the level of privacy controls you want by looking under Privacy in your browser's options, preferences, or settings. Please be aware that if you do this you may prevent some websites from working properly or as quickly and efficiently as they would do otherwise.