What the Atlas stores about you
Almost nothing. There are no accounts. Reading the site requires no identification.
- Preference cookies. Your interface language is stored in a first-party cookie
(
aa-lang) so the site remembers it. Your theme, your guided/expert choice and your saved-page stars are stored in your browser's local storage (aa-theme,aa-view,aa-fav) and are never transmitted to the server. Clearing your browser data removes all of them. - Newsletter. If you sign up, your email address is stored so it can be sent to you. Nothing else is collected with it.
- Contact and correction forms. What you type, plus the page you were on. Name and email are optional on the correction form.
- Ask the Atlas. The question text and a truncated IP address are logged so that the rate limiter works and so that common questions can be turned into proper pages. Do not put personal information into that box.
- Server logs. Standard web-server request logs, retained for operational purposes.
What it does not do
No advertising or analytics profile is built by this site. No data is sold. There is no tracking pixel, no session recording, no cross-site identifier, and no third-party analytics script at the time of writing.
Third parties
Ask the Atlas sends your question, together with a compact extract of this site's own data, to Anthropic's API to produce an answer. Do not include personal information in a question.
Images are served from this site's own servers, not hotlinked, so viewing a page does not disclose your visit to Wikimedia. Fonts are self-hosted for the same reason. News links and source links take you to third-party sites governed by their own policies.
Advertising. If Google AdSense is enabled on this site in future, Google and its partners may use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this and other websites. You can opt out of personalised advertising through Google Ads Settings, and out of third-party vendor cookies at aboutads.info. Where such advertising is enabled and the law requires it, a consent mechanism will be presented before any non-essential cookie is set. No advertising cookies are set while this notice says none are in use.
Your rights
You can ask what the Atlas holds about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted, via the contact page. Because so little is stored, this is usually a short conversation. Newsletter emails carry an unsubscribe link.
Children
The Atlas is written to be readable by children but is not directed at them and does not knowingly collect information from them.
Changes
If this policy changes materially, the change will be reflected here. Continued use of the site after a change constitutes acceptance of it.