Privacy and cookies

Reading the site. Needs no account and leaves nothing behind but the anonymous visit count and the small notes in your own browser described below.

A test on the festival pages. For some visitors, a festival's link to its organiser's own site asks for a free account first; every date, map, guide and article stays open without one. Which group your browser is in is drawn once, at random, and kept in its local storage as one word, so you get the same answer on every visit. That word travels with the anonymous visit count, so the two groups can be compared; it says nothing about you.

Accounts and the Knight membership. If you register, we store your email address, the name you give (optional), a hashed password we cannot read, and when you last signed in. If you sign in with Google instead, Google tells us your email address and its own id for your Google account, and nothing else: no name, no picture, no contacts. We write to you with news and offers only if you ticked the box asking for them; tell us to stop and we do. If you become a Knight, we also keep what Polar tells us about the membership: a customer and subscription id, its status, and its renewal and end dates. We also keep which festivals you follow. We use your address to send what a Knight pays for (the weekly letter) and messages about the account itself, such as a password reset.

Payments. Polar (Polar Software, Inc.) is the Merchant of Record for our orders: you pay Polar, and Polar handles the card details, tax, receipts and invoices under its own privacy policy. We give Polar your email address, your name if you gave one, and an id that links the payment to your account. We never see or store a card number. You pay on Polar's own checkout page; nothing of Polar's loads on ours.

Keeping and deleting. Delete your account by writing to us from its address; we remove the account and stop all email. Records of payments are kept as long as tax law requires, by Polar and, in the minimal form above, by us.

The old newsletter box. If you gave us your address there, we hold that address and the page you gave it on, nothing else. Ask and it is deleted.

Analytics. When we count visits, we do it with a privacy-friendly tool that sets no cookies and doesn't identify you. It keeps a random id in your browser's local storage so that ten pages read by one person count as one person; clear your browser data and it's gone. We see which pages are read and which country they're read from, not who you are.

The membership offer. When you move to leave a page, the site may show the Knight offer once. So that it doesn't come back on every page, your browser's local storage keeps the date it was shown: a date, nothing about you, and it never leaves your browser. It is asked again no sooner than a week later.

Cookies. One session cookie keeps forms working and, if you have an account, keeps you signed in; tick "keep me signed in", sign in with Google, or make an account to open a festival's official site, and a second cookie remembers that for next time. Both are strictly necessary for what you asked the site to do, and neither is used to track you. That's all, today.

Ads, when they go live. Display ads from Google AdSense will use advertising cookies. If you're in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland you'll be asked first, and "Do not consent" will be one click, the same as "Consent". Change your mind any time via "Privacy choices" in the footer. We'll update this page, and its changelog, the day ads switch on.

What we don't do. Sell or share your address. Track you across other sites. Fingerprint you. Show you a cookie banner we don't need.

Contact. hello@medievalbooker.com.

Changelog: 22 August 2026 — first version, no advertising cookies. 28 August 2026 — explained the random id the visit counter keeps in local storage; still no cookies. 21 September 2026 — accounts and the Knight membership: what an account stores, payments, the sign-in cookies. 25 September 2026 — payments are now handled by Polar; we no longer keep payment amounts ourselves. 3 October 2026 — the membership offer shown on leaving a page, and the date it keeps in local storage; the private calendar link is retired, and the festivals a Knight follows are named. 12 October 2026 — signing in with Google and what Google tells us; news and offers by email only on request; a test in which a festival's link to its organiser asks some visitors for a free account, and the one word it keeps in local storage.