Privacy

With your permission we record which page you are reading, which sections readers reach, which claims get expanded to their evidence, which studies get opened, and which links between subjects get followed. That is what tells us whether the depth is worth building.

Each of those carries only the name of the thing you opened — the page’s address on this site, which section, how strong the evidence was rated. Nothing identifies you: there is no account number, nothing that fingerprints your device, and nothing that could follow you to another site, because none of it is collected in the first place. A page address here is a path such as /explore/migration; it never carries anything you typed.

Everything search needs to work arrives with the search page and then runs in your browser. Nothing you type is transmitted anywhere.

We record that a search happened, roughly how long the query was as a band such as “6–10 characters”, and how many results it produced. Never what you actually typed — and that holds for both places the counting goes. Anything that looks like a phrase rather than a count is refused automatically, so that a future mistake cannot quietly start sending it.

With your permission, some substantial pages may carry discreet advertising. There are no pop-ups, no interstitials, no autoplaying video and nothing that covers what you came to read.

Several kinds of page never carry advertising at all, whatever you have agreed to: anything about animal suffering, dangerous species, conservation crises or safety guidance, along with claim checks, study pages and everything in this section of the site.

NatureHQ itself keeps one thing on your device: your answer to the privacy question. It holds your two yes-or-no choices and the date you made them, and nothing else. It is not a cookie, it contains nothing that identifies you, and it is never sent anywhere — it stays on your device so that we do not have to ask you again.

If you agree to analytics, Google Analytics additionally sets its own first-party cookies once it loads. Those are set by Google rather than by us, they are how it recognises a repeat visit, and they do not exist at all if you decline. We would rather say so plainly than let “we set no cookies” do quiet work for us.

Clearing your browser data removes all of it, and you will be asked again.

Until you agree to analytics, NatureHQ loads nothing whatsoever from anybody else — no fonts, no images, no trackers, nothing. Every page you read before answering the privacy question comes entirely from this site.

Two different things count what happens here, and they are governed differently, so it is worth separating them plainly.

Our own counting runs whether or not you agree to Google Analytics, and it is deliberately built so there is nothing to agree to. It records which page was opened and which of the things above you did, and it attaches a random number to a single browsing session so that two pages read one after the other can be recognised as one visit. That number is created fresh when the page loads, is never written to your device, and is gone when you close the tab — there is no cookie, nothing in storage, and nothing that could recognise you tomorrow or on another site. It goes to a HEKNO service rather than to an advertising company, and it is the same kind of record a web server keeps of its own traffic.

Google Analytics is separate and stays behind your consent. If you do agree, exactly one outside service is brought in. It arrives at that moment and not before, so declining means Google is never contacted at all and there is nothing about your visit left over for anyone to send later. We switch off its cross-device and advertising-audience features, and it never receives anything beyond the names of the things you opened — which page, which section, which claim — together with small numbers describing where in a list you found them, such as which card in a row or which stop along a guided journey. It never receives what you typed into search, and it never receives the address you came from or the one you went to.

Advertising is handled through a shared HEKNO platform service rather than by embedding an advertising provider in these pages, and no advertising provider is connected at present, so no advertisement is requested or shown anywhere on the site.

The site’s content-security policy permits connections only to this site, to the HEKNO service that receives our own counting, and — where Google Analytics is configured — to Google’s measurement domains. A connection to anywhere else fails rather than quietly working.