Your privacy choices

Always on

A few cookies are needed to serve you a page, to keep bots from knocking the site over, and to remember the choice you are making right now. There is no version of this site that works without them, so there is no switch here.

Always on. Stores nothing on your device.

We count how many people read each page and roughly which part of the world they were in. It sets no cookie and stores nothing on your device. It does read one thing: a number your browser reports for how much memory it will let a page use. That is a coarse property of the device, not of you, and we do not use it to work out who anybody is. The counter cannot tell us who you are and it cannot follow you anywhere else.

We cannot leave one person out of this count, and we would rather tell you that than offer you a switch that does nothing. The counter attaches no identifier to your visit, so there is no record of you in it for us to find and remove. What does work is stopping the counter from running in the first place. A content blocker, or your browser's own tracker blocking, will stop it, and then nothing about the visit leaves your device at all. If you would rather talk to a person about this, the contact form reaches one.

Allow detailed analytics

A more detailed picture of how people move through the site, using Google Analytics. It sets cookies that last up to two years and it tells Google that a visit happened.

It helps us see which policy issues people actually read about. It is not necessary for the site to work, and turning it off costs you nothing.

Allow advertising and conversion measurement

These are tags from social media and search advertising platforms. They let us reach people who care about these issues and see whether an ad brought anyone here. When one runs, that platform learns a browser visited a page on this site.

It never runs on a page about a health topic, and it never receives the page address or the page title. Those are rules in the code rather than settings on this page. Where the law says we have to ask first, it is off until you say yes, and if your browser sends a privacy signal it stays off.