Privacy and data use

We count visits with a random ID kept in your browser's local storage (not a cookie). For each visit we record the pages you open, the links and buttons you click, how far you scroll and how long you stay, the site you came from and any campaign tag in the link, your site language, time zone, screen and device type, browser and operating system. Known bots are not counted, and nothing is recorded if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control. We use no third-party advertising or analytics scripts.

We capture your IP address for two reasons only: to work out an approximate location (country, region and city, for example to see which cities use the site), and to keep the site secure. The place is looked up in a database held on our own server, so your address is not sent to anyone for it. Only the network part of the address is kept in the visit log (the last number is removed straight away), and it is deleted, together with the browser's user-agent text, within 60 days. The rest of the visit record, without them, is kept for up to 400 days. The location data comes from DB-IP.com.

Visits from search engines and AI crawlers are read from the web server's log so we can see which pages they fetch and check that they are the crawlers they claim to be, which is a security purpose. Their full IP addresses are deleted within 60 days and the entries are removed after 120 days.

Your question and the answer are stored for 90 days with a random visit ID and conversation ID. The IP address is not stored with them. To answer, the question, the earlier messages in the conversation and the page you are on are sent to a third-party AI provider (currently NVIDIA, Groq, OpenRouter or Google Gemini, whichever is available). Please do not type personal details into the chat. To limit abuse we count requests per visitor using a salted, hashed form of the IP address, for up to 24 hours.

If you use the agent form or request a market report, we store what you enter (name, a phone number or an email address, one is enough for the report, what you need, city and message), the page you were on, your random visit ID and when you agreed to us keeping your details. The agent form is itself a request to be contacted. For the report, you are contacted only if you tick the separate optional box; giving a phone number or email is not consent to marketing. Your details are not sold. These details are deleted automatically 6 months after you send them, and the name shown on an issued report is removed at the same time. Backup copies are replaced within 14 days. To have yours removed sooner, write to the address below.

Like any web server, ours keeps standard access logs (IP address, time, page and browser) for running and securing the site. These logs are rotated and removed within 60 days.

A sign-in cookie is used only on the staff admin pages. Visitors to the public site are not given cookies by this site.