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, and 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. Your address is not kept for that: what remains of it is a short trace, and every day it is computed anew. Tomorrow you are a new person to the count, and not even we can join two of your visits. Beside the trace lie only the day and the word “museums”: not which page you opened, not which browser, not where you came from.

Every site in the world records the requests made to it: 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 but 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. That is precisely why we embed nothing of theirs inside our pages: until you click, nobody knows a thing.

You will be shown no consent banner: there is nothing to consent to. But it would be untrue to say the General Data Protection Regulation does not concern us: a shortened address in the records and a trace in the count are still data about you. We follow the rules in full, and that is easy precisely because there is so little data. The pages are served from a machine outside the European Union: for a reader within the Union that is a transfer of data abroad, and we say so plainly rather than burying 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.