Privacy
How this site handles data
This website counts how many people read it, which documents they open, and — in general terms — where and what sort of organisation they are reading from. Most of that counting is done by the site itself. It also uses Google Analytics, which runs on every page — you can switch it off for your device with the button below, and it stays off.
What is stored on your device
The site itself sets no cookies. It keeps two small things and nothing else: your dark reading mode preference, if you switch it on, and your choice below about Google, if you make one. Neither is sent anywhere.
Google Analytics stores an identifier in a cookie on your device. Switching it off with the button below removes that cookie and stops anything further being sent.
What is recorded
For each page view: which page, the date and the hour, the page you came from and the one you go to next, the site you arrived from (its name only), and which shared link you followed, if you followed one.
About your connection: your country, the nearest town or city, part of your postcode, and the organisation that runs the network you are using. The part of the postcode kept is the letters and numbers before the space plus the single digit after it — RH5 4, never RH5 4QT. That covers a few thousand addresses. It was the letters and numbers alone until 24 August 2026, and it went a step finer because a magazine was distributed to the villages around Dorking and the shorter form cannot tell one of those villages from another: RH5 on its own covers a dozen of them. For most people that last one is simply their broadband or mobile provider. For someone reading from a large organisation — an NHS body, a council, a university — it is the name of that organisation, not of any person in it.
About your device: whether it is a phone, tablet or computer, and which operating system and browser.
About what you do here: roughly how long a page was open, how far down it you scrolled, which links you clicked, which source documents you opened or downloaded, and which questions you expanded.
What is not
Your IP address is never stored. It is used for a moment to tell whether two page views are the same visitor, then discarded; what is kept is a scrambled value that cannot be turned back into an address, and it is regenerated every calendar month, so your visits in one month cannot be joined to your visits in the next — with one exception, set out below, which is a single yes-or-no and carries nothing else with it. Never your full postcode, never your street or your address. No names, no email addresses, no accounts, no advertising, and nothing sold or shared with anyone.
This is more than it used to be
Until August 2026 this site deliberately kept nothing finer than your country, and it honoured Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control by recording nothing at all about readers who had either switched on. Both of those have changed, and this page would rather say so than quietly stop being true.
The scrambled value above also used to be regenerated every day rather than every month. That meant somebody who read on five days counted as five different readers, so the site could not tell how many people had actually read it — the one thing the counting is for. Extending it to a month buys that answer, and the cost is real and falls on you: within a calendar month, repeat visits can now be recognised as belonging to the same reader. It is still not a name and still not an address.
One thing now does cross the turn of a month, and this is the part to read if you read nothing else on this page. On a magazine carrying this site’s address began being distributed around the Dorking area, and the family wanted to know how many people it brought who had not read the site before. Answering that means the site has to remember whether you had read it before that date — and because the scrambled value above is regenerated each month, remembering it needs something that survives the regeneration.
So one thing is carried across: a single yes or no, meaning “this reader had already read the site before the magazine went out”. Nothing else is carried with it. It does not make one month’s visits joinable to the next — knowing somebody was reading in July does not say which of August’s visits are theirs — and it holds no record of what was read, when, or from where. It reaches back one month and no further, so if you do not visit for a whole calendar month it is forgotten and you are simply a new reader again. It is worked out from your address and your browser at the moment you arrive, in the same breath as the scrambled value, and your address is discarded immediately afterwards exactly as it was before.
The reason is the subject of the site. Whether the bodies this account concerns have actually read it is a question the family have a real interest in, and country-level figures cannot answer it. That is a judgement they have made, and its cost falls on every other reader, which is why it is set out here in full rather than buried.
If you would rather not be counted
Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control are no longer honoured by this site’s own counting. Turning off JavaScript in your browser stops all of it, and the site stays completely readable without it — nothing here needs JavaScript to be read. Google Analytics is separate and has its own switch below.
Google receives a record of your visit, through Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. That is which page you opened and the ordinary technical details that come with any web request. It runs on every page of this site unless you switch it off below, in which case nothing further is sent to Google and its cookie is deleted. Switching it off changes nothing else — the site works identically, and its own counting above continues either way.
Google Analytics here is set to measurement only, with advertising and ad-personalisation switched off. Tag Manager is a container whose contents are managed separately, so what it loads can change; this page is updated when it does.
Who holds it, and for how long
This site is published by the family of Dr Thomas Guilder, and it is the family who hold these records. They sit in the site’s own database with its host, Cloudflare. Nothing is kept for more than twelve months.
Questions
[email protected] — for anything on this page, or a correction to the site.
Last updated .