Privacy

This notice sets out what SYNCULTURE records about visitors to synculture.net, why, and what you can ask us to do about it.

Who is responsible

SYNCULTURE is a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant (grant 101232294) and based at the University of Birmingham. The site runs on its own domain rather than the University's web service, and the project is responsible for what it records.

For anything in this notice, including a request to see or erase what we hold, write to the project's Principal Investigator, Christopher Haworth, at c.haworth@bham.ac.uk.

What is recorded

Delivering the site. synculture.net is served through Cloudflare. Like any web server, Cloudflare receives your IP address with each request, along with the page requested, the time, your browser's user agent string and the referring page. It needs the IP address to return the page to you, and uses request data to block attacks and abuse. Cloudflare's own traffic dashboard counts a visit per unique IP address and derives an approximate country from it. We see those counts in aggregate. We cannot see, search or export the underlying addresses.

Visit statistics. We run Cloudflare Web Analytics to see which pages are read and how fast they load. It sets no cookies, writes nothing to your device and builds no identifier for you. It does not fingerprint visitors by IP address, user agent or any other signal. A visit is counted simply as a page view whose referring page sits outside this site, so the measure is pages and not people. The statistics we get are page paths, approximate country, referrer, browser and device class, and load timings, all in aggregate.

Storage on your device. The interactive handbook keeps the code you type in your browser's local storage, and the SuperCollider runtime keeps its working files in your browser's IndexedDB, so that your drafts survive a reload. Both stay on your machine. Neither is transmitted to us or to anyone else, and clearing your browser's site data removes them.

What we do not do

We run no advertising, no cross-site tracking, no profiling and no third-party trackers beyond the Cloudflare analytics described above. We do not sell or share visitor data. There is no cookie banner because nothing we use for analytics stores or reads information on your device, so there is nothing for you to consent to.

Lawful basis

Delivering and protecting the site, and reading aggregate visit statistics, rest on our legitimate interests under Article 6(1)(f) UK GDPR: running a functioning research website and knowing in general terms which of its outputs are being read. The interest is narrow, the data is aggregate, and we have set the site up so that no visitor is identifiable from it. There is no login and no account, so we hold nothing that names you.

Processors and transfers outside the UK

Cloudflare, Inc. acts as our processor for serving the site and for the visit statistics. Cloudflare is established in the United States and operates a global network, so your data may be processed outside the UK and the European Economic Area. Those transfers are covered by the data protection terms in Cloudflare's customer agreement.

How long it is kept

Cloudflare's edge logs and the aggregate analytics are retained under Cloudflare's own retention periods, which we do not control. We keep no visitor records of our own, so there is nothing on our side to delete.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you can ask us for a copy of any personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct or erase it, ask us to restrict how we use it, and object to processing we have based on legitimate interests. In practice we hold no record tied to an identifiable person, so an honest answer to a request will almost always be that there is nothing of yours for us to show you or erase. We would rather say that than imply otherwise.

Write to c.haworth@bham.ac.uk. If you are not satisfied with how we respond you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Changes

We will revise this notice if what the site records changes. This version dates from October 2026.