Your data and this book

School of International Futures Ltd is the data controller for this site. We are a not-for-profit company registered in England and Wales, number 07761692, at Onega House, 112 Main Road, Sidcup, Kent DA14 6NE, United Kingdom.

Our Data Protection Officer is Peter Glenday. Anything in this notice — a question, a request, or a complaint — reaches a person at peter@soif.org.uk.

This notice covers playingwithtime.com only. SOIF’s general privacy notice covers our other sites, and describes a different set of systems.

The site is closed: you need an email address to read the book. That single fact is where most of this comes from, and it is also why there is no advertising, no tracking that identifies you, and no consent banner for anything that does — we already know who you are, so nothing has to be inferred about you from anywhere else. The one exception, described fully under Cookies and Analytics below, measures pages in general rather than anyone in particular.

We do not sell your data, share it with anyone for their marketing, or use it to build a profile of you for advertising. We do not attempt to work out where you are from your IP address — the country on your account is the one you told us, and our analytics are explicitly configured to discard IP-based location. The site-measurement storage described below is never linked to your account, your email, or your reading history — it stays a separate, pseudonymous record of how pages in general are used.

No individual reader appears in any report we produce. The internal page that shows how the book is being read works only in aggregate, and suppresses any group smaller than five, because with a readership this size a count of one is a person.

One cookie for signing in. When you sign in, the site sets a session cookie so that the next page knows it is still you. It is strictly necessary — without it there is no signed-in state — so it needs no consent, and there is no banner to dismiss for it because there is nothing to ask about.

A cookie, and some local storage alongside it, used only to measure how the site and book are used. Together they recognise that a return visit is the same browser, so we can see paths through the site and pages people click and scroll on (see How we measure whether the book is working, below). None of it carries your name, your email, or any way to identify who you are — only a random ID, kept for up to a year. Since February 2026, UK law (PECR) has allowed storage like this — used solely to measure and improve a service, never to identify or track a specific person — without asking for consent each time, provided we tell you plainly (this is that) and let you turn it off:

Our video player is asked not to set cookies. It would otherwise store an identifier of its own for playback statistics; we turned that off, and you can check by looking at the Play page in a clean browser.

A few preferences are kept in your browser’s local storage rather than sent to us: your contrast and text-size settings, and whether you muted a video. They never leave your device and clearing your browser data removes them.

We want to know how many people are reading, roughly where they are, which parts of the book get read and where people stop. We want to know it without following anyone around, so the measurement is built the awkward way round on purpose.

Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights count page views and page speed. Both are cookieless and neither builds a profile.

PostHog (on their European servers) records a small, fixed list of events — a conversation opened, a conversation finished, a path chosen, a contribution made. It is sent from our server rather than from your browser, so it sets no cookie and cannot be blocked or skewed by extensions. You are identified to it only by a one-way hash of your email address: it can follow a reading journey and it cannot work out whose.

A second, separate measurement runs in your browser rather than on our server, to tell us which pages get read and looked at, and — through heatmaps — roughly where on a page people click, tap and scroll. This uses a cookie (see Cookies, above), but not one that needs your consent: UK law allows a cookie used solely to measure how a service is used, in order to improve it, provided we say so clearly and let you opt out — this page is that notice, and the toggle above is that opt-out.

Because it never sees who is signed in, this second stream is entirely separate from the reading-history analytics above — the two do not link into one profile, even for a reader who is signed in while browsing. Heatmaps show an aggregate pattern of clicks and scrolling across everyone who visited a page, not a recording of any one visit, and are not tied to any individual, signed in or not.

Everything else comes from the site’s own records, described above, and is only ever looked at as a total.

We use these companies to run the site. None of them may use your data for their own purposes.

Some of these process data outside the United Kingdom. Where they do, the transfer is covered by the standard contractual protections required by UK data protection law.

Your account, and everything attached to it, stays until you delete it — this is a book people read over years, and progress that expired would be worse than useless. Sign-in codes last fifteen minutes. Reading-history analytics events are kept for twelve months; the site-measurement cookie and storage described above last up to a year before your browser’s next visit renews them; the aggregate counts made from either are not personal data and are kept indefinitely.

Under UK GDPR you can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, object to how we are using it, or ask us to restrict our use of it. Two of those you do not have to ask for at all:

• Download everything we hold about you as a file, from your profile, at any time.
• Delete your account and your data, from the same page. It removes your account, your reading history, and everything you have saved. If you have posted in Play, you choose whether the post goes too or stays with your name taken off it — because deleting a contribution can remove part of a conversation other people joined.

For anything else, write to peter@soif.org.uk. If you think we have got this wrong, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, though we would rather you told us first.

Nothing you write here is sent to an AI system. Our AI policy sets out where AI has been used in making this book and site, and where it has not.

This page changes at the same time as the software it describes, which is the point of keeping it alongside the code. Material changes will be flagged to signed-in readers rather than quietly published.