What this site stores

Almost nothing, and nothing that identifies you.

Our own figures

We count readers without a cookie. Each visit is turned into a one-way hash of your address and browser, mixed with a secret that changes at midnight. It cannot be reversed, and tomorrow’s hash of the same visit is a different number — so we can tell how many people read something, and we cannot tell whether you came back.

Your IP address is never stored. It is used once, to work out roughly which county a visit came from, and then dropped.

Signing in

If you work here, signing in sets one cookie so the site remembers you between pages. Readers never get it.

Advertising

There is no third-party advertising on this site, so there is nothing to ask you about. The advertising we do carry is sold directly to local businesses, and an advert is an image and a link — no cookies, no scripts, nothing that follows you anywhere.

Why there is no banner most of the time

Because there is nothing to consent to. A site that asks permission to set cookies it does not set is teaching people to click through without reading, and that habit is the reason consent banners stopped meaning anything.