Privacy

Rates and Limits counts page views, and collects nothing else. There is no account to make, no newsletter to join, no form to fill in, no cookie, no advertising, and no analytics company anywhere in this. The counter is software we run ourselves at cs.ratesandlimits.com, on the same account that serves the pages, and this page describes exactly what it records. It is short because there is little to describe, and it is specific because a privacy page that says "anonymous statistics" and stops has told you nothing.

The counter

It is Counterscale, an open source page counter that runs on Cloudflare Workers. Ours is deployed at cs.ratesandlimits.com, a subdomain of this site, and the counts it writes stay in this site's own Cloudflare account. Nothing is sent to a vendor, sold, shared, joined to anything else, or used to build a profile. There is no profile: the counter has no way to tell your second visit from a stranger's first.

A page carries a single small script, a few kilobytes of javascript inside the document itself, which runs after the page has finished rendering. Nothing is fetched from anywhere to make it run, and it is the only script this site ships. What it does is askcs.ratesandlimits.com for a one pixel image at /collect. What is recorded is the query string of that request, plus the two things any request to any server carries anyway: the user agent string your browser sends, and the country Cloudflare reads off the connection.

What one page view records

• The address of the page you are on, without any query string.
• The site the link came from, if you arrived from another site. A link from one page here to another records no referrer at all, and the query string is removed from the ones it does keep.
• The utm_ parameters, if the address you followed carried any. They are put there by whoever wrote the link, not by us.
• Your browser's user agent string, and the browser name, version and device type read out of it. Everything after the major version number is replaced with an x before it is stored, so 140.0.7339 is kept as 140.x.x - a version that precise is a line in a fingerprint.
• The country Cloudflare attaches to the request, and nothing finer than the country.
• The time.

What it does not record

• No cookie, and nothing in local storage or session storage. The script writes neither.
• No IP address. Cloudflare necessarily receives one to answer the request - see below - and the counter neither stores it nor derives an identifier from it.
• No identifier of any kind, and no fingerprint. Nothing recorded is unique to you, so nothing recorded can be looked up, followed between pages, or matched against another site.
• Nothing you type. The filters and the calculators run entirely inside your browser and send nowhere what you enter; the counter records that a calculator page was viewed, never what was computed on it.

How a repeat view is told apart

A counter that cannot tell one visitor arriving five times from five visitors arriving once is not much of a counter, and the usual way to tell them apart is to plant an identifier on you. This one does not. The pixel is returned with a Last-Modified date, your browser offers that date back on the next request the way it does with any cached image, and the seconds field of it counts 1, 2, 3 and stops. That is the entire mechanism. It holds one of three values, it says nothing about who you are, it is reset at midnight, and it is a property of your browser's cache rather than anything stored about you.

Who can see the counts, and for how long

The counts are written to Cloudflare's Analytics Engine on this site's account, where they are kept for three months and then gone. Nothing is copied anywhere else for longer. The dashboard that reads them is behind a password and shows totals - which pages were read, from which countries, from which referring sites - not visits, because there is nothing in the data that could be assembled into one.

What the pages do

• They set no cookie and write nothing to local storage or session storage. Nothing you do on one page is remembered on the next, or on your next visit.
• They request one thing from a host other than this one, and it is the counter above, on this site's own subdomain. The stylesheet is part of the page, the two icons and the sharing image are served from this domain, and the typefaces are whichever ones your device already has - no font is downloaded. Every other outbound address on a page is a link you can see, pointing at the government document the figures were read from, and it is followed only if you click it.
• Almost every page here is a static document whose content needs no javascript at all. The exceptions are the filter box on the home page, the filter on a state list, and the calculators. All three run entirely inside your browser: they read what you type, work out an answer, and send it nowhere. There is nowhere for them to send it.

What the hosting edge necessarily sees

The files are served from Cloudflare's network. Delivering a page to you means Cloudflare receives the request that asks for it, which as with any host on the internet includes your IP address, the address you asked for, your user agent string and the time. That is a property of how the web works rather than a choice made here, and it is stated because a page describing what we keep should not be silent about a request that plainly reached somebody. Whatever Cloudflare retains for operating and protecting its network is governed by its own terms. Nothing beyond the counts described above is exported or read by anyone here.

Email

Writing to hello@ratesandlimits.com is the one way to hand this site personal information, and it happens because you chose to. The message and the address it came from sit in a mailbox and are used to reply to you and to check a figure against the document you named. They are not added to any list, and there is no list to add them to. Ask and the message is deleted; it is the only thing here there is to delete. See contactfor what is worth sending.

The api, the snapshots and the embeds

The JSON api needs no key, no account and no registration, so a request to it carries no identity of ours and none is asked of you. It runs no counter, and neither do the stored source documents under /snapshots/, which are plain text files served the same way. An embedded card is a small page from this domain inside a frame on someone else's: it loads nothing from anywhere but here, counts nothing, sets no cookie, and reports nothing back except its own height to the page that framed it, which is how it sizes itself. A widget that counted views on other people's sites would be a tracker we had asked them to install, so it does not. If you would rather not run the loader script at all, the api page shows a plain frame that works without it.

If you would rather not be counted

Block cs.ratesandlimits.com, or block scripts on this domain, or turn javascript off. Every page here is written to be complete without it: the figures, the sources and the navigation are in the document itself, and the only things that stop working are the two filter boxes and the calculators. Nothing is withheld and nothing is asked in return.

Children

This site publishes government figures and has no way to know who is reading. It asks nobody for their age because it asks nobody for anything.

If this changes

Everything above is a description of the code, not a promise about it, and the two are kept together on purpose. The build refuses a page that carries any script but the one described here, refuses one whose script reports anywhere but the address above, and refuses a build in which two pages ship different ones - so a tracker could not be added to this site without this page becoming false in the same commit. If something here starts collecting anything more, this page says so before it ships.