This page displays the current privacy settings applied to your browsing session on our websites. You can view your settings or change them, if you wish. A brief overview of each preference is included in the relevant sections below. For detailed information and explanations as to what each preference means, please consult our website privacy policy and our cookies policy.
As part of our commitment to respecting and protecting the privacy of our visitors, we host our own analytics servers in-house. This means we control nearly all aspects of what data is gathered, how it is stored and, importantly, how it is used. We do not ever rent, sell or share analytics or user profile data with any other parties. To meet our analytics needs, we have chosen to use Matomo. This is a self-hosted open-source analytics package that shares our values of protecting user privacy while still providing useful, business-critical information and analytics.
anonymized usage data
In order to provide a useful website and help ensure a good experience for our visitors, we need to collect some information. Broadly speaking, this includes information about where our visitors are coming from, what pages they visit and what products and/or services they choose to obtain information about. This allows us to determine things such as mirror/CDN (content-delivery network) server locations for fast access, the number of servers we require along with their page-serving capacity, how to budget for servers and bandwidth and which pages might need updating or more informational content. In addition, usage information plays a vital role in helping to stop misuse and abuse of our website and servers.
Information deemed as 'usage data' are always anonymized and are only stored in that form. For example, we only collect and store the network portion of IP addresses. We drop the final part of IP addresses (the host portion) which means we can never determine which individual device (and by extension, user) made a particular request. Furthermore, for analytical purposes, all usage data are aggregated such that individually sourced data are never processed. For details on what 'usage data' we collect, please refer to our our website privacy policy
Due to these data all being anonymized and aggregated, we do assume an implicit agreement on the part of visitors to provide such data. If you wish to opt-out of providing these data, you may do so by toggling the option below. Note that if you have already opted-out of providing such data, you may click the toggle below to opt back in. Choosing to provide, or continue to provide, such data is very much appreciated as these data greatly help us to run and maintain our website.
NOTE: If you opt-out of providing anonymized data, you are implicitly disabling all other forms of tracking including cookies. You can think of this setting as an overall 'do-not-track' setting for all of our websites.
cookies-based tracking
Cookies, in a tracking and data analytics context, allow us to enhance our understanding of visitors using our site(s), better measure our sites' performance and provide additional functionality and features. Most important, cookies are the only practical method for implementing many site features such as remembering your preferences, sign-in status, etc.
Cookies are small files stored on your device sent from our website. Cookies may or may not contain personally identifiable data. Some Cookies simply store preferences such as 'prefers dark mode', which is not personal information, while others may contain items such as a Visitor ID number which is personal information. The cookies referred to on this page are only those of the second type -- those that contain personally identifiable information or information which can be linked to an individual.
In terms of analytics, cookies allow us to store a randomly generated identification number that is stored on your device and used by our website to remember whether you have visited us before, what pages you have visited, and how you have interacted with our site in the past. Since cookies of this nature contain an identification number which is associated with your device, and thus loosely linked to you as a person, we do not assume consent to using these specific types of cookies. Please refer to our cookies policy for more information about how we use cookies.
If you wish to opt-in or opt-out of allowing us to utilize cookies which contain potentially or actually personally identifiable data, you may do so using the toggle below. If you choose to opt-out, please be aware that some features of our website(s) may not work correctly. Also note that, regardless of the setting you choose using the button below, cookies will be automatically disabled if you have opted-out of providing 'usage data'.