Privacy – a note on the policy at this site

On many web sites now, you are asked to accept or modify the kind of information the site gathers about your visit, to ensure protection of your privacy. This is, for commercial businesses, required for compliance compliance with EU regulations on privacy. While the EU requirements do not apply to the Upstream Journal, here is the low-down on privacy on this site.

The Upstream Journal does not ask you to select options, because your personal information is not gathered, such as your precise location or IP address, and we do not market or sell information about visitors to anybody.

That being said, there is a cookie that is placed by Google that tells us stuff about our general audience, like how many visitors the site has, the countries they are in, what pages are visited, and how long people stay on the site.

As I write this in late October 2022, for example, I can see that the top three sources for visitors in the past 30 days are India, the US and Canada. I see that China is in the top ten, along with a couple of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, so our audience is quite diverse. Popular pages right now include the article on child marriage and our article on the struggle for the rights of Adivasi women in India. The number of visitors has gone up by 46% over the past 30 days, and I see that while most come because of a search engine like Google, others have followed a link on our Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn pages.

That kind of information is really helpful, as you might imagine, but information about you as an individual visitor to the site is your own business.