What we keep about you

1

What is never asked for

No name, no address, no birth date, no payment details and no documents. Those are the ordinary currency of the sequences counted on this domain, and none of them is wanted on this side of a link. Nobody needs an account to read a count and nobody is offered one.

There is no newsletter either, and so no list of addresses to lose. Anybody who wants to know whether a figure has moved can look at the reading date printed on the guide and read it again, which costs nothing and leaves no trail in anybody’s database.

2

What a visit leaves behind on this side

Three things, and they are the ordinary mechanics of a web page rather than a collection exercise. The first is a server record of the request: the address the request came from, the page asked for, the time, and what the browser said about itself. Those records exist so that broken pages can be found and so that an attack on the domain can be noticed, and they are kept briefly and then discarded.

The second is measurement, which is a count of how many people read which page. What is wanted from it is whether a guide is being read at all, not who read it, and it is configured to answer the first question and not the second.

The third is whatever a browser keeps on its own account, which on this domain amounts to very little: no advertising tags are placed here, so nothing on this side follows a reader onward to anywhere else. A browser set to refuse all of it will render every page on the domain exactly as it renders now.

3

What becomes of a message sent in

Messages are welcome, and the route is on Send us a line. Whatever is in one is kept: the address it came from, what it said, and whatever reply went back. There is no way of answering a correction without keeping the correspondence, so no pretence is made of deleting it on arrival.

What is not done with it is anything beyond answering it. A message about a figure is read, checked against the source, acted on where it is right, and filed. It is not added to a mailing list, not passed to anybody commercial, and not used to work out anything about whoever sent it. Anybody who would rather their correspondence were deleted can say so in it, and it will be.

4

Three things none of it is used for

None of it is sold. There is no arrangement under which anything about a reader of this domain is passed to a gambling business, a data broker or an advertising network, and the funding arrangement that pays for the work does not run on reader data: it runs on registrations at the far end, which is set out at what pays for the work.

None of it is used to target anybody. No reader is sorted into a category, scored for susceptibility or shown different material from anybody else. Every reader of a guide sees the same count, the same sheet and the same two declared assumptions, which is the only version of this work that could be checked by a stranger.

And none of it is used to decide what a guide says. A figure on this domain comes out of published wording and arithmetic, so no amount of knowing who is reading could change one.

5

Why this page names no legal duty

A page of this sort usually recites a list of rights and a statutory basis for each line of what it does. This one does not, and the omission is deliberate enough to be worth explaining.

Everything this publication asserts about rules is taken from a sheet of readings checked against primary sources and cited in the sentence spending it. That sheet covers gambling regulation and nothing else: it holds no reading on data protection law at all. Rather than paraphrase a statute nobody here has opened and attach a citation that would be decoration, this page states what is actually kept and leaves the law unquoted. That is the same rule the guides follow when a term is unpublished, which is to report the gap instead of filling it from memory.

So what is above is a description of practice rather than a claim about anybody’s obligations. Anybody needing to know what the law asks of a publisher should go to the body that administers it rather than to this page.

6

The far end of a chain, which this publisher cannot speak for

Everything above stops at the edge of this domain, and the sequences counted here do not. A reader who follows a link, registers somewhere and sends documents across has handed personal material to somebody this publisher has no relationship with and no information about. Nothing on this page says anything whatever about what happens to it after that.

What can be said is what a British licence would have obliged, and the contrast is the useful part. A licensee must establish and verify who a customer is before that customer gambles at all, and the condition will not settle for less than three identifying particulars, which it names off the rule sheet, claim 10. It must also say, ahead of any deposit, which documents could be called for, together with the timing and the means of supplying them off the rule sheet, claim 12. A reader dealing with a licensee therefore knows in advance what is being collected and roughly when.