Privacy

We set no cookies and write nothing into your browser's memory. That is why there is no consent banner here: there is nothing to consent to. You need not take our word for it: ask your own browser what this site has left with it — the list will be empty.

The page carries no counters, no ad networks, no embedded maps, no fonts from elsewhere. Everything it loads comes from us. An ordinary page pulls in a dozen such outside services, and each of them sees you before you have read the first line; here there is not one.

We do want to know how many people read this section, and your address is not kept for it. What remains of it is a short trace, computed anew every day, so that tomorrow you are a new person to the count, and joining two of your visits is beyond even us. Beside the trace lie only the day and the word “museums”; the page you opened, the browser and where you came from are not there.

Every site in the world records the requests made to it, for there is no fending off attacks otherwise. Your full address is not in those records; it is cut short, so that a network is visible and a person is not. They are kept for 52 days and then erase themselves; we link them to nothing and pass them to no one.

What stays is your text and — if you left one — a way to reply: otherwise there is nowhere to answer. We ask for neither a name nor an address. Letters are erased after a year; you may ask for earlier erasure in the same letter.

A link to a map or to a museum's own site leads to somebody else's page, where somebody else's rules apply, and what is written down about you there is no longer in our power. We embed nothing of theirs inside our pages for that reason: until you click, nobody knows a thing.

You will be shown no consent banner, since there is nothing to consent to. It would be untrue, though, to say the General Data Protection Regulation does not concern us; a shortened address in the records of requests and a short trace in the count are still data about you, and we follow the rules in full. The pages are served from a machine outside the European Union, and for a reader within it that is a transfer of data abroad; we would rather say so here than bury it in a footnote.

To ask what we hold about you, and to demand its erasure, write to us through the contact form. The answer will most likely be “nothing”: we ourselves cannot tie those records to a person. A letter we shall find and erase.

No ad networks, no third-party counters, no selling of data about readers, no letters you did not ask for, no account required in order to read anything. Should any of that ever appear, this page will say so before it does.