Privacy

This site carries no advertising and sells nothing. The only thing we measure is how people find and read the articles, so we know which parts of world history to write about next.

What we use

Google Analytics 4 records page views, referrers, approximate location (country and city level), device type and browser language. It sets cookies in your browser to tell one visit from another. We have switched off Google Signals and ad personalisation, so the data is not used to build advertising profiles, and IP addresses are handled in anonymised form.

Nothing else on the page calls an outside server: the fonts are the ones already on your device, and there are no social widgets or third-party trackers.

View counts, recommendations and comments

Each article shows a view count, a Recommend button and a comment box. These run on our own server, not a third party, and they do not use cookies or accounts.

Views: we count one view per reader per article per day. To do that the server computes a hash of your IP address, your browser’s user-agent string and a salt that changes every day, and keeps only the hash for two days. The salt is discarded, so the hash cannot be turned back into your address, and yesterday’s hash cannot be matched to today’s.
Recommend: one recommendation per reader per article, using a similar hash with a fixed salt so that you can undo it. We store the hash and the time, never the address.
Comments: we store the comment text, the name you type (or “Anonymous”), the time and a hash of your address and browser, which we use only to limit the rate of posting and to block abuse. If you set a password so that you can edit or delete the comment later, we store only a salted hash of it; we cannot recover a lost password. Comments are public. We may remove any comment. To have a comment removed, write to the address on the Corrections page and quote the article and the comment text.

If you subscribe to the weekly email, the address you type is sent to Kit (kit.com), the service that stores the subscriber list and sends the email. Kit first sends a message asking you to confirm. We use the address only to send the weekly newsletter. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes you from the list; you can also ask for removal through the address on the Corrections page. Kit’s own handling of the data is described in the Kit privacy policy.

What we do not do

We do not have accounts, and we do not collect names. The only email addresses we hold are the ones people give to subscribe to the newsletter. We do not sell or share data with anyone else, and we do not use it for advertising.

How to opt out

Any of these stops the measurement:

Use your browser’s “block cookies” or private-browsing setting for this site.
Install the Google Analytics opt-out add-on.
Turn on “Do Not Track” or a content blocker; we do not work around them.

Hosting

Pages are served by Cloudflare, which processes requests and may keep short-lived logs for security and traffic handling. See the Cloudflare privacy policy.

Questions

Write to us through the address on the Corrections page.