Privacy Policy

Voices for Independence takes your privacy very seriously:

  • We do not use cookies.
  • We do not use any form of tracking or fingerprinting.
  • We do not track which articles you read (with one exception, see below).
  • We do not use your IP address to identify who you are or where you come from.
  • We do not under any circumstances send or sell any information to third-parties.

This website is hosted in the European Union and you have all the rights and protections laid out in the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR).

What information we do collect and how it is used is described in the following sections.

Visiting the site

When you visit the Voices for Independence web site our web server records the following information: your computer's IP address, the time you visited the site, the page you visited and the type of browser you used. This is typical. Here are some of the ways this information is used:

  1. To see how many unique visitors there are.
  2. To find out what pages are popular.
  3. To decide whether to spend more effort making the pages easy to read on mobile phones.
  4. To decide whether we need to support old versions of web browsers.

This information is only used to make improvements to the web site. It is not shared with anybody in any way.

Reading articles

When you click on the link for an article, we do record the click, which we use to count the number of times a given article is read. We do not add any information, for example, your computer's IP address that would identify you. What you read is your own business.

There is one exception to this. When you subscribe to the Daily Digest newsletter the link for each article uses a short URL, for example, https://www.voices.scot/article/Vy64U/. When you click on the link you will taken to the Voices for Independence site and then redirected automatically to the article you requested. We do this to record the click and update the number of views for the article. This request will be logged by our web server. It does not identify the article you wanted to read directly but it's easy to look up in the database. This information is not used in any other way. We consider this to be an unsatisfactory situation and we will update this policy when the situation has been resolved.

Subscribing to newsletters

When you subscribe to the Daily Digest newsletter the email address you give is recorded in our database so we can send the messages to you each day. If you cancel your subscription then your email address is deleted immediately.

Contacting us

When you send us a message via the Contact form the information is forwarded to us in an email message. You can choose to give your name and email address. These are not required but clearly will be necessary if you need some form of reply. All messages are deleted no later than one month after the matter has been closed.

Backups

The database and logs are backed up every day in case of a server crash and we need to restore the site to working order. Backups are stored off-site but still within the European Union so your rights and protections still apply. Backups are retained for up to one year for data analysis, primarily for design and performance improvements. After this time the backups are deleted.

Changes

[20th Dec 2021] This is the first version of this policy. All changes in the future will be recorded here.