Privacy & Cookies

About this notice

This notice covers Alpekin’s public website, Journal, comments, and contact form. It describes the features available today; it does not describe future account services or products.

When you contact us

We collect your name, email address, subject, message, and selected category. If you choose a Journal member, that selection is stored with your enquiry, along with the submission time and whether it has been handled.

We use this information to understand and respond to your enquiry. Contact messages are not published. Authorized staff can read and manage them, and replies are sent through email. Please do not include passwords, payment information, medical records, or other sensitive information that is not needed for your enquiry.

When you comment on the Journal

We store the name you provide, your comment, the article and language it relates to, its submission time, and moderation status. Replies are linked to their parent comment. Published comments and display names are visible to other readers and may be indexed by search engines.

We also retain keyed fingerprints of the submitting network address and comment text, and a verification signature, to detect abuse and repeated submissions. These are not published. A fingerprint is not the raw address, but it should not be treated as fully anonymous information.

Security and technical records

Our server receives technical information needed to deliver pages, including your IP address, requested address, time, browser information, and sometimes the referring page. Access and error logs help us investigate failures and misuse.

Forms use a self-hosted ALTCHA human-verification check. Your browser solves a small computational challenge and sends its proof to Alpekin. The check does not require an external CAPTCHA service. Contact submissions also use temporary keyed network-address fingerprints and verification records to limit repeated submissions.

Readership measurements

Optional browser analytics starts only after you choose Accept analytics. Rejecting or closing the prompt does not prevent reading the site. Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track keep both trackers off, even if you previously accepted.

Self-hosted Umami sends page visits, outbound-link clicks and downloads to Alpekin’s analytics server. It operates without analytics cookies. Records include page addresses, browser and device information, approximate location derived from the network address, and pseudonymous visitor and visit identifiers. These are not exact counts of people.

Google Analytics 4 sends page visits, reading engagement, scrolling, outbound-link clicks and downloads to Google. It uses first-party cookies to distinguish browsers and visits. Google receives technical information with those requests, including the network address, and processes measurements on its infrastructure, which may be outside your country. Swiss website hosting does not mean Google Analytics data stays in Switzerland.

We disable advertising personalization and Google Signals and do not send account identifiers.

How Google uses information from sites that use its services

We limit measurements to public page addresses and approved campaign tags; we omit visitor-entered search text, form contents, comments and identifying URL parameters. Page titles are omitted or replaced with a fixed site label, and referring addresses are reduced to their origin.

Privacy settings in the footer lets you change your choice. Withdrawal stops future browser analytics and removes applicable Google Analytics cookies from this site; it does not erase measurements already received. Technical access and error logs continue independently for site operation and security.

Fonts and the human-verification script are served by Alpekin.

Cookies and browser storage

Cookies support form security and temporary website state. Browser storage remembers your preferences when you choose them. These have different purposes and lifetimes:

• csrftoken — helps protect form submissions against forged requests. Its configured lifetime is approximately one year and it can be renewed when you visit.
• sessionid — connects your browser to temporary server-side state, such as contact-form confirmation. Its configured lifetime is two weeks; it is set when a session is needed.
• alpekin-public-theme — local browser storage for your chosen light or dark appearance. It has no automatic expiry and remains until you change it or clear site data.
• alpekin-analytics-consent — local browser storage recording your analytics choice, its date and notice version. Your choice expires after 180 days; an expired record is removed when you next visit. It is used to remember your preference, not to identify you in analytics. Clearing it causes the site to ask again.
• _ga and _ga_* — Google Analytics browser and session cookies, set only after acceptance. This site limits their lifetime to 180 days without extending it on each visit. You can remove them earlier through Privacy settings or your browser.

Who can access information

Access to private enquiries and moderation information is restricted to authorized staff. Hosting, infrastructure, and email providers can process information needed to operate their services. If you exchange email with us, your email service and ours also handle that correspondence.

Links to research sources, member websites, and other external destinations take you to services with their own privacy practices. Using an external sharing option also involves the service you select.

How long information remains

Umami measurement records currently remain until removed by authorized staff; no automatic analytics deletion schedule is configured.

Google Analytics is configured to retain user-level and event-level data for two months, without resetting that retention period on new activity. Aggregated reporting data can remain longer. Cookie expiry and deletion of previously collected measurements are separate processes.

Contact enquiries, comments, and their associated moderation records remain stored until they are deleted by authorized staff. They do not currently have an automatic expiry. Marking an enquiry as handled does not delete it. You can contact us to request review or deletion of information relating to you.

Contact rate-limit records expire after one minute and used verification records after two hours; expired cache entries may remain until cache cleanup. Journal comment fingerprints remain with their comment records.

The current web-server log configuration rotates logs daily and keeps up to 14 rotated files. Application logs and backup copies have separate maintenance cycles, so removing a live record does not necessarily remove every retained copy immediately.

Your choices and privacy enquiries

You can read public pages without submitting a contact message or comment. You can use browser settings to remove cookies and site storage; blocking security cookies may prevent forms from working. Clearing the theme preference restores the default dark appearance.

Contact us to ask about information relating to you or to request access, correction, or deletion. We may need enough information to verify that the request relates to you. Requests are considered under the law that applies to the circumstances, and some information may need to be retained for a legal obligation or dispute.

Contact Alpekin about privacy

Updates

We will update this notice when the website’s features or data handling change. The date above identifies the latest revision.