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Privacy and cookies policy

Last updated: 29 August 2019

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

Email

If you subscribe to our email bulletin (opt-in) then we will store the email address which you give us, along with any email preferences and your name if you choose to give that. We use Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager for this purpose, and we store your data securely. These details will be solely used for the purpose of sending information about our events and activities, and they will not be passed on to other organisations nor sold to anyone. We also maintain an archive of email bulletins which have been sent out. If you gave us information which is sent to the email list then it is retained in the archive. You can unsubscribe at any time, and amend your stored information and preferences.

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 2017, 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.

How do we use this information? We view the access logs in a very general way using a statistical package called AWStats. (If you're really interested, you can see a demo of the kind of statistics that we can see.) What do they tell us? If we know certain pages are unpopular, we can improve them or discontinue them for example.

Cookies

European Law requires that we inform you of how our website uses cookies (small files stored on a 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.

How can you find out more about privacy issues?

These sites may help you:

Thank-you!

We'd like to thank Chris Woodford for his assistance in drafting this privacy page and cookie warnings on this website.

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