Privacy Policy
This page describes what happens when you visitwww.crime-research.org. It covers the services this site actually uses today, not services it might use in future. We keep it in step with the site: when we add, remove or reconfigure something that touches your data, we change this page and move the effective date above.
The short version
- The site is a set of static pages. There is no account, no login and no user profile.
- We do not set advertising or tracking cookies, and we do not sell or share personal data.
- Our analytics are cookie-free and do not identify individual visitors.
- Advertising is switched off for visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. See Advertising below.
- You only send us personal data if you choose to write to us.
Hosting and security — Cloudflare
The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Like every web host, Cloudflare processes the technical details your browser sends with each request — your IP address, the page requested, the referring page, your user-agent string, and approximate location derived from your IP — in order to deliver the page, terminate TLS, and protect the site against attacks and abuse. Cloudflare acts as our hosting and security provider. Retention of these operational and security logs is governed by Cloudflare's own policies; seeCloudflare's privacy policy.
Analytics — Plausible
We use a self-hosted instance of Plausible Analytics (served fromplausible.pankratov.me) to count page views and see which pages people find useful. Plausible sets no cookies, stores no persistent identifier, and does not follow you across other websites. It records aggregate measurements only: page URL, referrer source, browser, operating system, device type and country. Because we host it ourselves, this data stays on infrastructure we control and is not shared with an analytics vendor.
Advertising — Google AdSense
This site is being prepared to carry display advertising from Google AdSense. Two independent checks apply before any Google advertising code is loaded:
- Page. Advertising is disabled on every page by default. It can only appear on individual pages a person has reviewed and approved as suitable. Our news archive, migrated articles, legislation pages and site pages are not ad-eligible.
- Region. If you appear to be in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, we make no request to Google's advertising servers at all — no ad is requested, no advertising script is loaded, and Google receives nothing about your visit from this page. We apply the same block whenever we cannot determine your region.
We do this because serving personalised or non-personalised AdSense advertising in those regions requires a Google-certified consent management platform, which we have not yet implemented. It is a deliberately cautious launch setting. If we later add a consent platform, we will replace this blanket block with a proper consent choice and update this page first.
That regional check works by reading the country Cloudflare associates with your connection at the edge. The check returns a yes-or-no answer to the page and nothing else: we do not log it, store it, or build any history of where visitors come from. Geographic detection from an IP address is approximate and can be wrong — we treat anything uncertain as “do not serve ads”.
Where advertising is served, Google may use cookies or similar technologies to serve and measure ads, as described inhow Google uses information from sites that use its services. You can review your Google ad settings atMy Ad Center.
Fonts — Google Fonts
Our typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com andfonts.gstatic.com). This means Google receives your IP address and user-agent when your browser fetches the font files. No cookie is set by these requests. We are working towards serving the fonts from our own domain to remove this third-party call entirely.
Search
The search page uses Pagefind, a static search index that is downloaded to your browser. Your search terms are processed on your own device and are never sent to us or to any third party.
Contacting us
If you use the contact form, you send us your name, email address, the topic you selected, an optional page URL, and your message. Two services are involved:
- Cloudflare Turnstile performs a privacy-preserving bot check on the form. It replaces a CAPTCHA and does not track you across sites.
- MailerSend delivers the resulting message to our editorial inbox. Your name and email address are included so that we can reply to you.
We use what you send only to answer you and, where relevant, to correct the site. We do not add you to a mailing list. Messages are kept in our editorial inbox for as long as they are useful for handling the enquiry and any follow-up correspondence, and are deleted when they are not.
Affiliate links
Some links to products are affiliate links, marked in ouraffiliate disclosure. If you follow one, the merchant or its affiliate network may set a cookie in your browser to attribute a resulting purchase to us. That happens on the merchant's site under its own privacy policy, not on ours, and we never receive your payment details.
Children
This site publishes research and reporting for a general adult audience. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you, to obtain a copy, to have it corrected or deleted, or to object to how we use it. Because this site keeps no accounts and no visitor profiles, in most cases the only personal data we hold is correspondence you have sent us.
To make a privacy request, use the contact form and choose thePrivacy request topic, or email[email protected]. We will respond to every request we can verify.
Changes to this policy
Material changes are published here with a new effective date, and the change is recorded in the site's public source history alongside the code change that caused it. We recommend re-reading this page if you rely on it.