Cookies

The short version

This site sets three cookies. All three are first-party – they are read by this website and by nothing else – and none of them is used for advertising. We run no advertising tags, no social pixels and no third-party analytics.

You can refuse the two that are not strictly necessary and the site works exactly as it did.

What each one is for

Only the third is strictly necessary. It exists to record a refusal, which is why refusing does not delete it.

• sct_vid – a random identifier, so a returning reader can be told from a new one. Kept for one year. It is not linked to your name unless you later send us the enquiry form.
• sc_lang – remembers which of the eleven languages you chose, so we never override it. Kept for one year.
• sct_cookie_consent – remembers how you answered the banner, so we do not ask again.

What we measure, and what declining changes

We count which pages people read, on our own servers, into our own database. Nothing is sold, shared or sent to an advertising network.

Be clear about one thing, because most sites word it the other way: the count itself is not switched off by declining. What declining changes is what we keep about you – no IP address, no browser string, no cookie, only an anonymous count under a pseudonym that is regenerated every 24 hours and cannot be connected to you the next day.

We do this because measuring only the readers who accept cookies means measuring a biased slice and calling it the total.

How to refuse or change your mind

• Use the banner when it appears, or your browser settings at any time after that.
• Every browser can block or delete cookies for one site. Deleting sct_cookie_consent brings the banner back.
• Blocking cookies for this site costs you nothing here – no feature depends on them.

Changes

If we add a cookie, this page changes on the same day and the date at the top says so.