Privacy, counted field by field rather than described in general terms

1

What the web server writes down, whatever you choose

Serving a page writes a line in a log, and that happens before anybody is asked anything. The line holds the network address the request arrived from, the date and time to the second, the path asked for, the response code the server gave back, the size of what it sent, the browser identification string, and the address of the page the browser came from where it sends one. Seven items, on every request, including requests for the stylesheet and the pictures.

None of those items is asked for. They are properties of the request itself, in the way a return address is a property of an envelope, and a reader cannot refuse them while still receiving the page. What can be said honestly is what is not done with them: no profile is built from them, they are not sold, and they are not matched against anything else held here, because nothing else is held here.

How long they survive is a question this page answers plainly rather than advantageously. The log rotates on the hosting account’s own schedule and this publisher has not configured a shorter one. Claiming a retention period that is not actually set would be the exact fault these pages criticise elsewhere, so no period is claimed.

2

What measurement adds, and only where it is accepted

Measurement runs only where a reader has accepted it, and the page is complete and fully readable where they have not. Accepting it adds four items to the seven above: an identifier that lasts the length of the visit and is used to tell one visit from two, the screen size and device class, the browser’s language setting, and a country or region worked out from the network address that was in the log line anyway.

Items recorded where measurement is refused 7 Items recorded where it is accepted 11 What saying no actually removes 4

Four is a small number and printing it is the point. A refusal here is worth four items rather than the whole of the record, because the seven in part one are produced by the request and not by the measurement. A page that offered a choice without saying how much the choice moves would be doing the thing this domain spends eighty-five guides complaining about, which is stating a figure on the banner while keeping the quantity that decides its value somewhere else.

What is absent from both counts matters as much as what is in them. No form anywhere on this domain asks for a name, an email address, a telephone number, a date of birth or a payment detail. There is no account to create, no newsletter to join and no comments to leave. The one address a reader might send is the one on the contact page, and that is a message they chose to write rather than a field this domain collected.

3

The two cookies, and how long each one lasts

Two cookies can be set by this domain and no more. The first records the answer given to the measurement question, so that the question is not asked again on every page, and it lasts twelve months. It is set whichever way the answer went, because a refusal has to be remembered as surely as an acceptance does.

The second is the measurement identifier described in part two. It is set only where measurement was accepted, it lasts for the length of the visit, and it is gone when the browser session ends.

No advertising cookie, retargeting pixel or cross-site identifier is set by this domain. Changing the answer is done by clearing the first cookie in the browser, after which the question is asked again on the next page served, and clearing both is a complete reset of everything this domain has placed on a reader’s device.

4

What an outbound link hands over, and what comes back

A link from here to an operator is how this publisher is paid, which the payment page sets out in full. Following one sends three things: the identifier that tells the destination which publisher the reader arrived from, a campaign tag where one is used, and the address of the page the link was on, which the browser sends by itself.

From the moment that link is followed, the destination’s own recording begins under the destination’s own policy. This publisher neither writes that policy, nor controls it, nor sees what it produces. A reader leaving this domain is leaving the whole of what this page can tell them, and the honest instruction is to read the policy at the far end on arrival rather than to assume it resembles this one.

What comes back in the other direction is the part worth stating precisely, because it is smaller than most readers assume. A tally arrives: how many readers arrived, how many opened an account, and what is owed. No name, address, balance, stake or game arrives with it. Which individual reader opened an account is settled nowhere in writing on this side of the link, and that blankness is built into the arrangement rather than extended as a courtesy by anybody.

5

What you can refuse, and the rights you hold

Three refusals are available and all three work. Decline measurement when asked, and the four items in part two are never recorded. Clear the cookies, and the twelve-month memory of the answer goes with them. Send a browser signal asking not to be tracked, and nothing on this domain overrides it, because nothing here tracks across sites in the first place.

Under British data protection law a person has rights over information held about them: to be told what is held, to get a copy, to have an error corrected, to have the information deleted, to restrict or object to a use of it, and to withdraw a consent previously given. Exercising them here means writing, and the address is on the contact page. A request about a visit needs the date and the approximate time, since the only identifier in the log is a network address and there is nothing else to match a person to.

Where an answer from this publisher is unsatisfactory, a complaint goes to the United Kingdom’s data protection regulator, whose own site carries the current route for making one. No statute section, article number or regulatory reference is printed in this clause, and the reason is the rule this domain applies everywhere else: the fact sheet behind these pages covers gambling regulation and nothing besides, and a citation nobody here has checked against its primary source does not get printed just because it would look authoritative.

The same discipline governs the counts above. Seven and eleven are not estimates and not a template’s guess at what a site like this probably does. They are the items actually written, listed so that a reader can hold this page to its own arithmetic the way the method page asks them to hold every other page here.