Privacy

The short version

We collect as little as the site can run on. Nothing is sold, nothing goes to a data broker, and no advertising network, tag manager or third-party analytics script runs on these pages — not one.

An ordinary visit sets no cookies at all.

Everything below describes what this site actually does. Where something is less tidy than we would like, it is written down rather than left out.

Counting readers

For each day we store the date, the path of a page, and how many times it was opened. Anything after a ? in the address is cut off before it is recorded.

To make “visitors” a count rather than a guess, your browser makes up a random value the first time you arrive — sixteen random bytes, generated by your own browser, derived from nothing about you — and keeps it under sbi:vid in local storage. It is not a cookie, so it never travels with ordinary requests, and it is attached to no name, address or account.

The page counts and the visitor ids are kept in two separate tables with nothing in common but the date. That is deliberate: it means this site cannot reconstruct what any one reader looked at, and neither can anyone who gets hold of the database.

Clear your browsing data and the id is gone. The site then counts you as someone new, which is a price we are glad to pay.

When you write to us

The contact form stores your name, your email address, your subject line, your message, and which page you were reading when you wrote. That is the complete list. It does not store your IP address, which browser you used, or where you came from.

Your address is there so we can reply, and for nothing else. It goes on no mailing list. Ask us to delete a message and it is deleted outright — the row is removed, not hidden or flagged.

If you subscribe, we store your email address and nothing else. Every issue carries a one-click unsubscribe. The list is not sold, rented or shared.

Search terms

Words typed into the site search are stored with the number of results they returned, so we can see what people came looking for and did not find. Nothing identifying is stored beside them — not a reader, not a session, not an address. Long queries are cut to 180 characters.

How long any of it is kept

Daily totals — a date and two numbers — are kept indefinitely. They say nothing about any individual.
Per-day visitor ids and per-page counts are deleted after 400 days.
Search terms have no automatic expiry at present. They carry no identifier, but we would rather say so than imply a limit that does not exist.
Messages and newsletter addresses are kept until they are deleted, either by us or because you asked.
Server logs roll over as described below.

What the server records anyway

This part is true of nearly every website, and leaving it out would make the section above look better than it is.

Like any web server, ours writes an access log: the IP address a request came from, the browser’s user-agent string, the address asked for, and the response given. It is used for fixing faults and spotting abuse, and it is never joined to anything in the sections above — no part of this site’s own code ever reads your IP address. The log rotates after 50 MB and keeps seven files, and entries are discarded after ninety days at the latest.

The site also sits behind Cloudflare, which serves the pages and therefore sees every request before we do, under their privacy policy rather than ours. The database is backed up off the machine so it survives the machine; anything stored above is in those backups until they age out.

Cookies and browser storage

The public site sets no cookies — we checked the response a first-time visitor gets, and there are none. A session cookie exists only for an editor signed in to the admin area. Cloudflare may set its own as part of serving the site.

The one thing this site itself puts in your browser is the random sbi:vid value described above, and it lives in local storage rather than in a cookie.

Links to other sites

We link out to hospitals, registries, journals and news publications as sources. Those are ordinary editorial links: nobody pays us to link to them, we take no affiliate commission, and following a link does not tell us that you did.

Every image on this site is served from this site. That matters more than it sounds: a page that loads a photograph from another company’s server makes your browser call that company directly and hand it your IP address, without anything being clicked. No page here does that.

Once you follow a link and are on another site, its policy applies and not this one.

Your data

You can ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. Use the contact page. We will action it and tell you when it is done.

In practice, for a reader who has never written to us or subscribed, the honest answer to “what do you hold about me” is: a contribution to a daily total, and a random value your own browser made up.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the change is dated on this page rather than made quietly.