Privacy and cookies
What this site stores, what it does not store, and why there is no consent pop-up to click away.
This site is static. Pages are rendered ahead of time and served as files; there is no login, no account, no comment form and no shopping basket. The short version of this page is that the site sets no advertising or analytics cookies of its own, and the only thing it ever asks you for is what you choose to type into one of the two forms described below.
Cookies
No advertising cookies, no analytics cookies, no cross-site identifiers, and therefore no consent banner: a banner that asks permission for nothing trains people to click “agree” without reading, which is worse than no banner. The note at the foot of the page that says all this is the one exception, and it is not a cookie: dismiss it and your browser keeps a single local flag saying you have seen it, which never leaves your device and is not sent to this site. Beyond that your browser keeps the ordinary technical state — a cache entry, a scroll position — the way it does on any site.
Logs
The web server keeps standard request logs, which include the requesting address, the page asked for, the time and the user agent. They exist to keep the site up and to find broken links, and they are not used to build a profile of a visitor.
The two forms
Two pages carry a form: the front page has a box for the newsletter, and Contact the desk has one for writing to us without opening a mail client. Both are run for this desk by Fortunida (fortunida.com), which hosts the small script those two pages load and receives what you submit; no other page on the site loads it, and nothing is sent anywhere until you press the button yourself.
The newsletter box asks for an email address and nothing else. We use it to send the digest you asked for, on the basis of that request, and we keep the address until you unsubscribe — every digest carries the link, and writing to the desk does the same job. The enquiry form takes the name, the address and the message you type. We use those to answer you and to check whether a page needs a correction, because answering readers is part of running the desk, and the message is kept as long as the answer and any correction need it.
Neither form asks for anything else, neither sets an advertising or analytics cookie, and neither address is sold, swapped or merged into a marketing list. What you submit reaches two parties and stops there: this desk and Fortunida as the service that carries it. Ask us to delete what you sent and we will, unless a published correction depends on it.
Third parties
Pages load no third-party fonts, no advertising scripts, no analytics and no embedded players; the one file loaded from elsewhere is the form script named above, on those two pages. Some pages, mostly in the archive, link out to other sites — regulators, operators and, where a placement was paid for, a commercial site. Following such a link takes you to somebody else’s privacy policy, and the markup marks the paid ones.
Writing to us
If you send mail to the desk, we keep the message as long as it takes to answer it and to check whether a correction is needed, and we do not add your address to any list. Corrections are published on the page that was wrong; the sender is not named unless they ask to be.
No byline, on purpose. Material here is signed by the desk and not by an invented person: if you see a name on a page, it belongs to someone quoted or to the author of a document, never to a persona we made up to look like a staff of ten.
Each number has an owner. Revenue lines, tax shares, licence numbers and dates are copied from the filing, report or operator page that holds them, and the sentence using a figure says where it came from. Where the source has no figure, this site leaves the sentence out instead of estimating one.
Mistakes get fixed in place. Point one out at [email protected]: the wrong line is rewritten on the page you read it on, with the old wording quoted underneath, so the change is visible rather than quietly swallowed.