Policies

Cookie policy

This website sets no cookies — none at all. We measure aggregate traffic with a cookieless tool that stores nothing on your device and builds no profile of you, which is why there is no consent banner to click through.

Last reviewed: 27 August 2026

Our approach

Regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 requires your prior opt-in consent before information is stored on, or read from, your device. Our approach is to stay outside that requirement rather than to ask you to click through it: we set no cookies, use no local or session storage, and place no identifier of any kind on your device. Because nothing is stored or read, Regulation 6 is not engaged and there is no consent banner.

We do measure how the website is used, in aggregate. UK GDPR still applies to that measurement, because your IP address is processed briefly in order to derive an approximate location. We rely on legitimate interests (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) for it: understanding which pages are read and which services are enquired about is necessary to run the website well, the data is aggregated and holds no identifier, and no profile of you exists to be used for anything else. The detail is set out below, and the processor is named in our privacy policy.

Cookies and similar technologies by category

Strictly necessary

None. The website is served as static pages and needs no first-party cookies to function.

Functional

None.

Analytics

No cookies and no stored identifier. We use Plausible Analytics, a cookieless tool provided by Plausible Insights OÜ, a company incorporated in Estonia, which processes and stores all visitor data in the European Union on infrastructure owned by European companies. What it measures is listed in the next section.

Marketing

None. We run no marketing or retargeting technologies of any kind, and we do not sell or share browsing data.

What our analytics measures

For each page view, six things are recorded:

  • the address of the page you are reading
  • the page or search engine you arrived from, where your browser reports one
  • your browser and its version
  • your operating system
  • your device type — desktop, tablet or mobile
  • an approximate location — country, region and city — derived from your IP address

Two kinds of click are also recorded: downloads of the documents in our downloads area, and clicks on links that take you to another website. In both cases what is recorded is the address and the click, with nothing attached identifying who clicked.

One further thing is recorded, and only when something has gone wrong. If you arrive at an address on this website that does not exist, we record that address and the name of the website you followed the link from, so that we can point the old address at the right page. We rebuilt this website in 2026 and every address on it changed, so links published elsewhere over the years still lead to pages that have moved. This is the only way we find out which ones. It records the address you asked for and the site you came from, nothing about you.

Your IP address is used to work out the approximate location and to distinguish one visit from another within a single day, then discarded. It is never stored. The mechanism for telling visits apart is a hash of a daily secret, the website domain, your IP address and your browser identification; the secret is rotated and deleted every 24 hours, so the same visitor cannot be recognised across two days, and neither we nor Plausible can work backwards from a stored figure to a person or a device.

What we deliberately do not do

  • No cookies, no local storage, no device fingerprinting, no identifier of any kind on your device.
  • No cross-site or cross-session tracking, and no following you from this website to any other.
  • No profile of you, and no data about you sold, shared or made available to advertisers or data brokers.
  • No analytics data transferred outside the European Union.
  • No collection of anything you type into a form as part of the measurement. What you send us through the contact form is handled separately, as described below.

Where the analytics script is served from

The measurement script, and the address it reports figures to, are served from globalconsortiumgroup.com rather than from Plausible's own domain. There are two reasons. It allows the security policy that this website sends to your browser to keep forbidding scripts from any origin other than this site, which meaningfully limits the damage any injected script could do. And it means the figures we review are not distorted by whatever proportion of our readers happen to run a content blocker.

We record it here because it has a practical consequence worth being straight about: a content blocker that would otherwise stop a third-party analytics script may not recognise this one. So we honour the request directly instead, in the way described next.

Asking not to be measured

If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal, our script does not load and no measurement request is made — not a reduced version, nothing at all. Both signals are treated as an instruction rather than a preference to be weighed, and neither requires you to tell us anything or click anything on this website.

Most browsers and privacy extensions can send Global Privacy Control; it is usually found under privacy settings. Blocking JavaScript for this website, or blocking the script directly, has the same effect. Nothing on this website depends on the measurement script to work, so switching it off costs you no content or functionality.

What we do with the figures

They are reviewed quarterly, alongside Search Console data, on the cadence set out in our maintenance schedule. We use them to decide which pages need rewriting, which service pages are worth expanding, and whether enquiries are reaching the contact form. We do not use them to target anyone, and no individual can be identified in them.

The contact form

When you submit our contact form, your message is handled by our own website infrastructure and delivered directly into our Microsoft 365 environment. No cookie is set by viewing or submitting the form, and no third-party form processor is involved. Details of how your enquiry data is handled are in our privacy policy.

Changes

If our use of cookies or measurement technologies changes, the Privacy Lead updates this page before the change goes live. Where a non-essential cookie is proposed, the Privacy Lead puts a consent mechanism in place first, and no such cookie is set until it is.