Privacy
This site counts how often a page is read. It does not attempt to learn who read it, and it cannot. No cookies, no visitor identifier, no cross-site anything. Here is the whole of it, so you can check rather than trust.
What is counted
When you open a page, a single message records four
things. The path of the page you opened. The HOST of wherever you came from, so
linkedin.com rather than the full address of the page you were on.
A campaign tag, only when the link you followed carried one. And whether the
screen is a phone, a tablet or a desktop, in those three buckets and no finer.
That is the complete list.
What is never collected
No cookies. None are set and none are read. Nothing is written to local storage either.
No identifier. There is no visitor id, no device id and no hashed stand-in for one. Two visits by the same person are not, and cannot be, linked to each other.
Your IP address is not stored. It reaches the server the way it must for any web request, is used only to reject automated traffic, and is never written down.
Your browser's user agent is not stored. It is read once, in memory, to decide phone or tablet or desktop, and then discarded.
Not the page you came from. Only its host. A full referring address can carry private context, so it never leaves your browser.
No advertising, no data brokers, no third-party analytics. There is no Google Analytics here and no ad network. The counter runs on our own infrastructure, so your reading is not an asset anyone else holds.
Why there is no cookie banner
Because there is nothing to consent to. A consent banner exists where a site processes personal data, and nothing described above is personal data. We would rather remove the reason for the banner than show you one.
If you would rather not be counted
Turn on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control in your browser and this site sends nothing at all. Not sent and then ignored, simply never sent. Both signals are also honoured a second time at the server, so a message that should not have been sent is still not counted. Any content blocker will stop it too, and the site works exactly the same with it blocked.
One caveat, because a page like this is worth
nothing if it is only mostly complete. When the server refuses a message it
writes down why it refused and when, and that is the entire record. The words
dnt-header and a timestamp. No path, no referring host, no address,
no user agent, nothing that distinguishes one refused message from another. A
visit that opts out therefore leaves strictly less behind than a counted one,
and what it leaves cannot be tied to you or to a page. It is kept for one
reason. The server answers every message the same way whether it counted it or
threw it away, which is good for you and was briefly terrible for us, because a
counter that recorded nothing looked exactly like a counter that worked.
What is deliberately imprecise
Country is recorded when the network happens to supply it, which on this host it currently does not, so in practice that field is empty. Region and city are not recorded at all, and that is a choice rather than an oversight. Alaska has small communities where a region is closer to a name than a statistic.
Because there is no visitor identifier, this site cannot report unique visitors, only pages read. That is the honest cost of the design and we would rather publish a smaller true number than a larger invented one.
If you give us something on purpose
Two parts of the site accept something from you deliberately, and both are opt in. If you subscribe to deadline alerts, your email address is held by our newsletter provider and used to send you those alerts and nothing else. If you run the Bottleneck Scanner, it reads the public pages of the address you give it, and any contact detail you choose to add is used to send you that result. Unsubscribing is one click and removal is on request.
The counts are public
Since none of it describes a person, there is no reason to keep it. The aggregate figures are open at a public endpoint, no key required, so anyone can check how much of this site is read and where readers arrive from. This publication already publishes every document it has checked a claim against and every correction it has made, and it would be odd to treat its own traffic as the one secret.
Why this page exists
This publication spends its time asking public bodies who decides, when, and whether anyone gets a say. It would be a poor showing to ask that of an agency while quietly building a profile of the people who read the answer. If you find anything on this site that contradicts this page, that is a defect worth reporting and it will be fixed.