Privacy Policy

By Stephen Hewitt | Published 28 January 2021 | Last updated 4 March 2021

By policy, Clarion does not use JavaScript at all.

Everything required to display any page from www.cambridgeclarion.org in a browser comes only from the website itself. There are no cross-site requests in any page and no data-sharing arrangements with third parties. In particular the site does not use Google analytics or any other third-party analytics.

This means all images, CSS files, iframes and fonts can come only from cambridgeclarion.org itself.

This site is not commercial, does not attempt to make money and does not carry any kind of advertisement, and does not use “pixels”, “web beacons” or anything else to track its visitors off-site.

From time to time it attempts to count the number of visitors to each page, or to selected pages, to assess interest in different topics and success in providing information. For the purposes of distinguishing human visitors from robots and crawlers (which are the majority of traffic), the site may log the declared user agent string (UA), referrer, and other http headers from the browser and the time of each page access, without logging the IP address. Note that the web hosting provider may independently log IP addresses as described below in Server logs.

Cookies

This website does not use cookies itself but the UK-based hosting provider Iomart/Easyspace places a cookie. In response to my query about this cookie in 2018, Iomart stated in an email:

“The cookie you noticed on the site named server_id is used by our load balancing server which is used to improve load times and provide redundancy in times of network/server congestion.”

In 2021, the cookie typically contains the following - shown here in an http header:

Set-Cookie: SERVERID=vhost7-1_www; path=/

As apparent, it does not seem to contain enough information to identify an individual user.

Submitting comments

There are comment forms on some of the pages on this website through which visitors can submit a comment. This comment system does not use third-party providers or share data with third-parties. It was custom-made for Clarion and runs entirely self-contained on the web server that hosts the site.

Clarion's comment system does not request an email address or require any personal information when you submit a comment. The submission form has a field for a name, which will be published, but you are free to use a pseudonym or write “anonymous” Everything you write in the comment form will be published on the comment web page and will not be stored anywhere else.

The contents of comment forms which are submitted but not published are not stored. Reasons for non-publication might be rejection because a submitter fails the challenge question or never replies to the challenge. During the challenge someone's comment will be echoed back out to them in the form, but it is not stored on the server until it is published.

The comment submission system may log the user agent string (UA), time and referrer (which ought to be a page on Clarion) and the outcome but not the IP address for each attempt to submit a comment. This is for the purpose of assessing interest, monitoring attempts at abuse by robots and checking that the comment software is working.

Gremple, the German verb conjugator

Gremple currently logs every verb (or supposed verb) that is looked up, along with the user agent string (UA), date (but not time of day), referrer and the result. This is for the purpose of monitoring for attempted abuse by robots, counting how much it is used and improving the software, including detecting missing verbs.

Server logs

In January 2021 the website has currently been hosted for many years by UK-based hosting provider Iomart/Easyspace on a shared virtual server. I do not have access to the server logs but in response to a query about server logs in 2018, Iomart stated the following by email:

“The log files are held for at least 12 months and log information such as time, date, domain, IP, web browser, these are all stored in our GDPR compliant and secure UK data centres.”

Changes to this policy

The policies and details on this page may be changed in the future. If there is a change to the page then the fact of a change will be noted on the home page under What's new: a log of changes to this website.

External links