Privacy

The short version

• We never learn who you are. There is no account and no way to make one.
• We do count what happens in the museum — which organisms people choose as favourites, which exhibits hold attention, where visitors arrive from. Those counts are how a museum with no ticket desk finds out what is working.
• Your browser is given one random number so that a second visit can be recognised as a second visit. It says nothing about you and is not derived from anything about you or your device.
• We never record your IP address, and never the full address of the page you came from — only which site it was.
• If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal, none of this happens at all. Nothing is counted and no number is given.
• You can switch it off below, permanently, in one click.

Everything we record

This list is generated from the site's own code, so it cannot fall out of date. Every one of these carries which page it happened on and a coarse idea of where you are — the country, region and city your connection appears to be in, accurate to a few kilometres and never to an address. It is worked out from your network address, which is not itself kept.

candidate_clip_played

You played one of the unconfirmed candidate clips.

contribute_layer_toggled

You switched the Contribute layer on or off.

contribute_marker_opened

You opened one of the markers, and which part of the page it was about.

favourite_changed

You changed your favourite from one organism to another.

favourite_chosen

You chose a favourite organism — which one, and which one it replaced.

favourite_cleared

You un-chose your favourite.

hero_clip_played

An organism’s film started playing, and where it was served from.

hero_clip_stalled

An organism’s film failed to play or stalled.

outbound_clicked

You followed a link off this site — the destination’s host only, never the full address.

portrait_attention

When you leave a portrait: roughly how long you were there, how far down you got, and whether you reached the sources.

portrait_viewed

You opened an organism’s portrait.

powers_of_ten_depth

How far down the Powers of Ten ladder you travelled.

reduced_motion_served

Your browser asked for reduced motion, so you were shown the written description instead of the film.

room_entered

Which room of the museum you are in.

room_link_clicked

Which room you walked to next, and which one you came from.

share_completed

A share went through.

share_opened

You opened the share control, and which kind it was.

suggestion_failed

A correction you sent did not go through, and why.

suggestion_sent

You sent a correction — which part of the page it was about, whether you left a name, and whether you agreed to be credited. Never a word of what you wrote.

task_signpost_clicked

You followed a marker through to its task on Tinkerism.

visit_started_with_favourite

Once per visit: whether you already had a favourite when you arrived, and which.

What we never record

• Your IP address. Not stored, and not kept by our analytics provider either.
• The full address of the page you came from. It is cut down to the site's name in your own browser, before anything is sent — because a full address leaks pages and searches from somebody else's site, and that is their business, not ours.
• Anything you type. No form field is ever recorded, and nothing on this site records your screen.
• What you write in a suggestion. Corrections go to whoever looks after this museum and are never published anywhere. We record that one was sent and which part of the page it was about — never a word of it.
• Your name or email. We never ask for either.

Who else sees it

The counts are processed by PostHog, on servers in the United States. They receive the events listed above and the random number, and nothing else. This site loads no advertising, no social-media widgets and no tracking pixels, and nothing here is sold or shared with anybody.

The museum shares its random number with tinkerism.organd its project sites, which are run by the same people. That is so a visit that begins here and continues there reads as one visit rather than two strangers.

Switching it off

This works immediately and lasts. Clearing your browser's storage for this site also resets the random number, which disconnects every future visit from every past one.

Using the museum

Every moving image here was made by somebody else and is shown under an open licence. Credits & licences lists every asset, its author, its licence and where it came from, and that page — not this one — is the real answer to what you may do with the footage. The licence on each clip governs; ours is only to have collected them.