What’s Past is Prologue
This page outlines the data that is stored by this website, the purposes for which it is used, and to remind you of your rights respecting the use and storage of your information.
Information stored on your computer
Cookies are small files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently to improve the user experience, as well as to provide certain information to the owners of the site.
Cookies are everywhere in modern websites. This site is very modest in how it uses cookies. The cookies used are standard ones, common with many other sites, and are used to make certain services work.
Platform cookies
This website is running Drupal which is a standard platform for hosting websites. Drupal stores some cookies to make the website work efficiently.
There is a cookie stored to record that you have accepted cookies. When you first visit the site, you will see a banner message indicating that by continuing to use the site you are accepting the use of cookies. If you don’t use the site further, this cookie isn’t stored.
For efficiency, Drupal stores whether your browser allows javascript to run. This cookie has already been stored.
If you log in to this site, Drupal stores a cookie to keep you logged in.
In certain less common scenarios there could be other cookies, for example, to store your preferred layout on a particular page.
Google Analytics
This site uses a tool called Google Analytics. It’s a very popular tool, reported to run on over 15 million sites including 60 percent of the top 10,000 sites (link). In summary, Analytics helps us understand how visitors use the site, and so improve the site. You can read more about the cookies Google store and how you can manage them.
Your choices for controlling cookies
This site relies on cookies to function. Without the cookies described above, the website won’t work fully. For example, you will not be able to stay logged in. Therefore there is no option in this site to prevent cookies.
However, it is likely that your web browser (the program or app you are using right now to view this page) has options to disable or delete cookies within the privacy or security settings.
Information stored on the website
Like most sites, this server uses log files. The log messages include a record of every page requested, the time of the request, the browser used and the IP address. The log messages are used to determine the cause of errors on our website, monitor for security issues, and check for spamming behaviour. These logs are automatically deleted after one month.
The server maintains statistics about overall usage patterns, used to analyse what content is popular with visitors and to charge the website owner for resources used. This data is aggregated and although it contains IP addresses, there is no further data relating to the IP address. Statistics are kept for 5 years.
Information stored by other sites
Google Analytics collects anonymised IP addresses. These are IP addresses with the final digits set to zero to obscure the physical location of a device. The IP addresses are not visible to us, and are deleted after 14 months.