Privacy & Cookies

Important information about your privacy and how I use cookies.

My Privacy Policy

I do not:

  • Require any form of registration to access any part of my website; it is all free to access to any user, anonymously.
  • Operate any kind of marketing mailing list or newsletter.
  • Use any third party advertising; all adverts are static banners served from UKFR.
  • Track what adverts are shown to whom, or who clicks on an advert banner.
  • Use any affiliate codes or similar.

You can verify many of the above points by viewing and inspecting the source code for any page here on UKFR.

Google analytics

Along with many websites, I use analytics to better understand site visitors, how they came to UKFR (what they searched for) and what my most popular – and unpopular – content is. I use “Google Analytics” for this which will run a javascript file and most likely use a cookie to follow you around UKFR. You should feel free to disable or block either if you wish. The data provided to me by Google does not identify you personally.

Logging of site access by my web host

It is an industry-standard practice for web hosts to log all site accesses and mine is no different. This means keeping logs of what pages are requested and what files are served, and other information such as your IP address. This information may be used:

  • To investigate website problems or error messages, whether hardware or software related.
  • To investigate any malicious use of my site.
  • To provide aggregate statistics, such as number of visitors or bandwidth used. 

I do not actively monitor, download or otherwise process this data, but want to make it clear that our web host stores it and I have the option to do so, in case of the issues mentioned above.

Cookie policy

Given the lack of registration required here, my cookie policy is also understandably short.

In the interests of clarity however:

  • If you see a cookie used by UKFR this is a cookie intended for admin/staff to enable the site to keep them logged in during their visit. It is not relevant to any other visitor, is not used for any other purpose (I don’t even have comments enabled on articles nor allow the public to register here) and can safely be blocked if you’re really paranoid about it.
  • Third party embeds may result in a cookie being used. I have no control over this and such cookies will originate from the third party, not from me. An example would be if you viewed a page with an embedded YouTube video, YouTube may access its own cookies on your device to personalise your “experience” (i.e. what adverts it shows you in the video, again, nothing to do with me!). Where available, I enable privacy controls, such as YouTube’s “We won’t collect information on your site visitors unless they play a video” option (gee thanks, YouTube!).
  • I use Google Analytics and this is likely to use a cookie to follow you across the site.