Privacy policy
What this site collects, why, on what legal basis, and what you can do about it.
Last updated .
The short version
- There are no accounts, no sign-up, no newsletter and no comments, so there is nothing to hold about you.
- The site's own statistics are daily counters: one number per article per day. No address, no user agent, no cookie, no session and no visitor identifier is recorded, which means no row can be traced back to a person — including by us.
- Where an article computes its figures from inputs you can change, that happens in your browser and the numbers you type are never sent anywhere. A tool that needs a server says so on its own page.
- Advertising is the one place personal data is involved, and it is switched off until you say otherwise.
Who is responsible
The operator of this site is the controller for the processing described here. The operator's identity, postal address and contact routes are published on the contact page, which is where to send anything to do with this policy.
There is no data protection officer. The processing described below is small in volume, involves no special-category data, no profiling by us and no automated decision-making, so the threshold in Article 37 of the UK and EU GDPR is not met.
What is collected
Page and tool counts
When an article or a tool is opened, one number in a daily total goes up. That is the whole record: a slug, a date and a count. The table has no column for an address, a user agent, a cookie, a session, a referrer or anything else, so there is nothing to link two visits together or to a person, and the counts are not personal data.
Nothing is stored on or read from your device to produce these counts, so they need no consent and the banner does not ask for any. They are collected whatever you answer.
Google Analytics
This site also uses Google Analytics 4, and only if you agree to it. Until you accept, no analytics script is loaded and no request is made to Google — not a reduced one, not a cookieless one, none. If you decline, that stays true permanently. You can check this yourself: open your browser's network panel before answering the banner and you will see no request togoogletagmanager.com.
If you do accept, Google sets the cookies listed in thecookie policy and receives, on each page you open, the address of that page, the page you arrived from, your approximate location derived from your network address, and your device and browser. Unlike the counts above, this does link your visits together, through an identifier Google stores on your device. That is what the identifier is for, and it is the reason this one needs your consent and the counts do not.
Google is a separate controller for what it collects here, and the data is processed on its infrastructure underGoogle's privacy policy. You can change your mind at any time from thecookie policy page, and you can block it for every site with Google's opt-out add-on.
There is no other analytics on this site: no Plausible, no Matomo, no pixel, no session recording, no heatmap and no fingerprinting.
Server logs
Every web server records the requests it answers, and ours is no exception: the path, the time, the status code, the response size, the browser's user agent string and the network address the request came from. Two things are done to that record before it is written. The address is truncated — the last part of an IPv4 address and everything below the network prefix of an IPv6 address are discarded — so what remains identifies a network, not a connection. Any cookie header and any authorisation header is deleted outright.
These logs exist to keep the site up and to see abuse. They are held in a fixed-size rolling buffer of roughly 50 MB per service and are overwritten by newer lines as they arrive, which in practice is a window of days to a few weeks depending on traffic. They are not archived, not exported and not used to build any profile.
What you type into a page
Where an article works its figures out from inputs you can change, that happens in your browser: the numbers you enter are not transmitted, stored or logged, and closing the tab is the whole of the deletion procedure.
A tool that cannot work that way — one that has to fetch something from elsewhere — states on its own page exactly what it sends and what is kept. Read that page before using it.
Preferences kept on your own device
Two small values are written to your browser's local storage: the light or dark theme you chose, and the advertising choice you made in the consent banner. Both stay on your device, are never sent to us, and are covered in detail in the cookie policy.
Anything you send us
If you write to us, we hold your message and your email address for as long as it takes to deal with it and for a reasonable period afterwards in case the same subject comes back. This site sends no email of its own; correspondence sits in an ordinary mailbox with an ordinary email provider.
Advertising, and what Google's cookies do
This site is funded by advertising supplied by Google. Advertising is served only where an approved Google AdSense account is configured for the site; where it is not, no Google advertising script is loaded and no advertising cookie is set at all.
Where advertising is served, Google's own disclosures apply, and we are required to state them plainly:
- Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this website or other websites.
- Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites on the internet.
- You can opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google's Ads Settings.
- You can opt out of some third-party vendors' use of cookies for personalised advertising at aboutads.info, and in Europe at Your Online Choices.
The advertising vendor on this site is Google, operating AdSense. Google serves ads itself and, where the account permits third-party ad serving, through the ad technology partners it works with, each of which may set cookies or identifiers on your device once you have agreed. Those partners are named on the advertising partners page, with a link to each one's website and privacy policy, and you may visit those websites to opt out of personalised advertising where the partner offers it. How Google itself uses information from sites that use its services is set out on Google's own page for that, in its advertising technologies notice and in its privacy policy.
The banner on this site asks a single yes-or-no question about advertising cookies; it is not a certified consent management platform. When one is in place, the same list of partners, with the purposes each claims, is presented there too — see the cookie policy for the state of that.
Nothing is set until you choose. Before you answer the banner, every Google advertising signal on this site is set to denied, which is the state that stays in force if you never answer it or if you answer no.
Legal bases
| Processing | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Serving the pages you ask for | Legitimate interests, Article 6(1)(f): running a website that works |
| Server logs with truncated addresses | Legitimate interests, Article 6(1)(f): security, abuse prevention and diagnosing faults |
| Daily page and tool counts | Not personal data, so no basis is required. No consent is needed either, because nothing is stored on or read from your device to produce them |
| Theme and consent preferences in local storage | Strictly necessary to provide the service you asked for, so exempt from the consent requirement. They never leave your device |
| Advertising cookies and identifiers, and personalised advertising | Your consent, Article 6(1)(a), given through the banner and withdrawable at any time |
| Replying to a message you send us | Legitimate interests, Article 6(1)(f): answering someone who wrote to us |
Who else sees any of this
- Google, and the advertising partners it serves through, where advertising is served and you have consented to it. For advertising data Google acts as a controller in its own right under its own terms, not as our processor, which means Google decides what it does with that data and is answerable for it. The partners are listed on the advertising partners page.
- Our hosting provider, which operates the servers the site runs on and therefore necessarily processes traffic in transit. We will name the provider on request.
- Our email provider, if you write to us, for the same unavoidable reason.
Nothing is sold. Nothing is shared with data brokers. There is no affiliate network, no retargeting pixel and no social media embed anywhere on this site.
Transfers outside the UK and EEA
Google is a global company and advertising data may be processed outside the UK and the European Economic Area, including in the United States. Those transfers are covered by Google's own safeguards — standard contractual clauses and, where applicable, its certification under the EU and UK data privacy frameworks — which Google sets out in its business data policies. We make no international transfer of our own.
How long anything is kept
| What | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Daily page and tool counts | Indefinitely. They contain no personal data and are the site's only record of what is read |
| Server logs | A rolling buffer of roughly 50 MB per service, overwritten automatically. Not archived |
| Theme and consent preferences | On your device until you clear site data. The consent record is treated as lapsed after 12 months and you are asked again |
| Email correspondence | As long as the matter is live, and a reasonable period after |
| Advertising cookies | Set and expired by Google, not by us. The durations are in the cookie policy |
Your rights
If you are in the UK, the European Economic Area or Switzerland you have the right to ask for access to your personal data, to have it corrected or erased, to have its processing restricted, to object to processing carried out on the basis of legitimate interests, to receive it in a portable form, and to withdraw any consent you have given — withdrawal being as easy as giving it, which is the entire point of the control on the cookie policy page.
There is an honest limit to what those rights can reach here. Because the site holds no account, no cookie of its own and no visitor identifier, we cannot connect a request to any record we hold, and we are not required to collect extra information about you in order to be able to. That is Article 11 of the GDPR, and it is a consequence of collecting almost nothing rather than an excuse. For the advertising data Google holds, Google is the controller: its own privacy tools are the effective route, and they are linked in the advertising section above.
If you think we have handled your data badly, tell us first — we would rather fix it. You may also complain to a supervisory authority: in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office; in the EEA, the data protection authority of the country you live or work in.
Children
Nothing here is directed at children. The subject matter is written for adults, the site is not designed to appeal to children, and we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has sent us personal data, write to us and it will be deleted.
Security
The site is served over HTTPS only. Administrative interfaces are not published on the public internet at all — they are reachable solely over a private network — and no member of the public can reach a login form here, because there is not one. The database holds no personal data to protect, which is the cheapest and most reliable security control available.
Changes to this policy
When what the site does changes, this page changes with it, and the revision date at the top moves. A change that widens what is collected will be announced through the consent banner rather than made quietly, because a consent given against an older disclosure is not consent to a new one.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about anything on MoneyVision, go to the contact page.