Privacy & cookies

THIS WEBSITE does its utmost to respect your privacy. Visiting it will give you "cookies" in only two circumstances:

  1. When you visit either the Freelance Directory or the Freelance Fees Guide, the site sets a "session identifier" cookie. When you log in to the Freelance Directory to edit your entry, it may also sets cookies noting that you are, in fact, logged in; and
  2. Recent pages ask your permission before allowing BlueSky, LinkedIn or www.twitter.com to set cookies when you share a link to a page.

1 Directory & Fees Guide cookies

Since these are essential to the functioning of these parts of the site, we are not required by law to ask your permission before setting them.

They are accessible only to - they can be "read" only by - this website. They are deleted when you close your browser (that is, the program you run on your computer or phone in order to view this website - such as Mozilla Firefox or Safari or Opera or Microsoft Edge).

The Directory also allows you to delete the login cookies immediately you log out - the "forget I was here" option. You must do this if you log in from a shared computer, such as a machine in a library, university or internet café, or a client's office

Given their evanescence and our promise not to reveal any information, the risk of these cookies posing any threat to your privacy is "vanishingly small" - as physicists say when describing the odds on a whirlwind in a junkyard accidentally assembling a working metropolitan railway.

2 Sharing and social media cookies

Pages added to the Freelance after the end of 2011 contain a "Tweet this" link for your convenience, and after the end of 2024 a "Share this" link adding BlueSky and LinkedIn.

We are fully meeting the terms of the UK Data Protection Act 2018, which implements the EU General Data Protection Regulation, by asking you whether you want to authorise us to allow these sites to set cookies, before you proceed.

The "Share this" button will not appear at all if you have JavaScript turned off in your browser program, due to the way we have met this requirement.

What are "cookies" and should I worry?

Cookies are small files stored on your computer. Each contains:

  • an expiry date (which may be "never");
  • an indication of what websites may read it; and
  • a short text code - examples are a "session number" or a "unique visitor number".

When one of these persists, the next time you visit a site that has permission to read it, the program running that site can refer back to your previous visits. This kind of information on your web travels is of value to advertisers and possibly others.

We have decided not to implement any buttons on this website for services such as FaceBook or Google+. Life is too short to keep up with their ever-changing non-privacy policies and the evolution of their manifest commercial interest in gathering as much such information as they can.

General privacy questions - our promise

This website does everything it can to avoid collecting any other information on you or your visit.

There is, somewhere, a log of all recent visits, but we do not have access to it and it is deleted monthly or more often.

We do keep a record of when you make changes to your Freelance Directory entry, to assist with help and support.

We will never reveal to any third party any information which we may have gathered, deliberately or accidentally, unless you count it being prised from our cold, dead fingers.

  • Posted 06 May 2012
  • Revised 27 Jun 2018 to take account of the passage of the Data Protection Act 2018;
  • Revised 09 Dec 2019 to fix typos introduced then
  • Revised 11 Dec 2024 to add more on social media and remove tedious and outdated detail of Twitter cookies