Privacy

This website counts visits so that I can see which pages are read and roughly where readers come from. I do this myself, on my own server, in a way designed to respect your privacy.

What I do not do

• No cookies, no local storage, no fingerprinting, no advertising or social-media trackers.
• No Google Analytics or any other third-party analytics. Nothing about your visit is shared with anyone.
• Your IP address is not stored for statistics. It is used once, at the moment of your visit, to look up an approximate location (country and city) and the name of the network you are on (for example a university or an internet provider). The lookup uses an offline database on my server; your address is not sent to any other service.

What is recorded for each page view

The page, the site that linked to it (only the site name, e.g. scholar.google.com), the hour of the visit, approximate location and network name as above, and the general type of browser, operating system and device. Downloads of PDF files and clicks on links to other sites (for example DOI links) are counted the same way. A random identifier links the pages of one visit for a single day only; it cannot be connected to you or to your visits on other days. Detailed records are kept for two years, after that only monthly totals.

Do Not Track

If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, only an anonymous tally is kept (“this page was viewed on this day”), without location, network, referrer or browser information.

Security exception

To protect the site, requests that look automated or hostile (for example vulnerability scans, very high request rates, or bulk downloading by scripts) are recorded together with their IP address. These records are kept for 180 days and used only for security. Ordinary visits are never recorded this way.

Questions: me@qhchen.ca. IP geolocation by DB-IP.