Privacy
This site sets no cookies, counts visits without identifying anyone, and has no advertising, no accounts and no login. We do not try to find out who you are. Beyond the ordinary requests any website host handles (covered under Hosting below), the things that reach us are the ones you choose to send: a gurdwara, a book, or an email.
Most privacy policies are long because the site has a lot to disclose. This one is short for the opposite reason, and everything below was checked against the actual build rather than described from intention.
No cookies, and therefore no cookie banner
The site never writes a cookie. That is why you were not asked to accept any — a consent banner for cookies that do not exist would be theatre, and an irritating piece of it.
What is stored on your device
A few things, all of them in your browser's own storage, and none of them anywhere else. Storage is not a cookie: it is never attached to a request, so none of this reaches this site, its host, or anyone else. The first five below are local storage and sit on your machine until you clear it; the last is session storage and goes when you close the tab.
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theme— if you use the light/dark toggle, your choice. It holds one word:lightordark. Clear it and the site follows whatever your operating system prefers. -
reading— which reading level you last chose on an entry,fullorkids, so the next entry opens the same way. -
ms-quiz-best— your best score on the quiz, as a number out of ten. -
ms-daily-streak— for the daily: how many days in a row you have played, and the date of the last one, so tomorrow can tell whether the run continues. -
ms-daily-followed by a date — your score for that day, which is what stops the same day being replayed. One small record per day you play. -
ms-pin-streak, for Pin the Place: how many days in a row you have finished it, and the date of the last one. -
ms-pin-followed by a date: where you dropped your pins that day, which is what stops a reload from resetting the clues. One small record per day you play. -
ms-year-streak, for Which Year?: how many days in a row you have finished it, and the date of the last one. -
ms-year-followed by a date: the years you guessed that day and what each scored, which is what stops a reload from resetting the rounds. One small record per day you play. -
ms-search-q: session storage only. If you search from the homepage, the words are held here for a moment so the search page can pick them up without putting them in the web address; the search page deletes it as soon as it has read it.
There is no account behind any of it and no identifier in it. None of it is sent anywhere, there is no leaderboard, and we cannot see your score — the questions are generated when the site is built and everything after that happens in your browser. Clear your browser storage and all of it is gone, including the streak.
If this site ever offers a shared ladder, a score would have to leave your device to reach it. That is a different promise from this one, and this page will be rewritten to say so before any such thing ships, not after.
Visitor counts, and no tracking
We count visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, so we can see how many people read the site, which pages, and roughly from which country. It sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device, and does not fingerprint you or follow you to other sites. We see totals, not people. Cloudflare's own description is here.
There is no Google Analytics, no tag manager, no pixel, no heatmap recorder and no advertising network. Apart from that one counting script, no page on this site loads any external script, stylesheet, font or image. The counts are by page address, so an address that contains something you typed (see Search, below) can appear in them.
Search matches on your own machine
The search on this site is built into the pages themselves. Your browser downloads a search index from this domain, and matching your words against it happens in your browser. We run no search server and have no search log.
How your words travel depends on how you search. With JavaScript on, a
search typed on the homepage is passed to the search page inside your
browser (the ms-search-q item above), and the search page
does not write what you type into the web address. In that flow the
words are not part of any request to this site.
There are exceptions. If JavaScript is off or browser storage is
blocked, the homepage search falls back to an ordinary form, and a link
shaped like /search?q=... (one someone sent you, or one you
bookmarked) carries the words in the web address. A web address is part
of the request, so in those cases the words reach Cloudflare, our host,
and may appear in its logs and in the page counts described above. We
do not read them or use them for anything, but we cannot claim they
never leave your device in those cases.
The map is the one exception
The Global Map draws its background map from OpenStreetMap, a non-profit mapping project. Loading those tiles means your IP address and the area of the map you are looking at are visible to OpenStreetMap's servers, under their privacy policy.
This happens only on the map page. Every other page on the site is served entirely from this domain. We flag it because it is the one place where visiting this site tells a third party other than our host anything at all.
Hosting
The pages are static files served by Cloudflare, with a small program running only for the two forms and the private review page. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes the network requests needed to deliver a page, including your IP address and the full address requested, and keeps operational logs for security and abuse prevention under its own retention rules, which we do not control. We do not use any of it to build a profile of readers.
If you add a gurdwara or suggest a book
The forms on /gurdwaras and /books are the only places this site sends anything to us. When you press send, we keep:
- what you typed into the form;
- your email, only if you chose to give it, used only to ask you a question about your entry and never shown to anyone.
To enforce a limit of five sends an hour (gurdwaras and books together) we also use a scrambled code made from your IP address and a secret ingredient only we hold (a salted hash). It is not stored with your entry. It is kept only in a small counter for the current hour, and a daily clean-up deletes it once it is two hours old, so it is gone within about a day. It is pseudonymous rather than anonymous: reading it does not reveal your address, but it is derived from your address, which is why we keep it so briefly and use it for nothing else.
These sit in a database on Cloudflare that only the site's maintainer can open. Nothing appears on the site until it has been checked by hand. For an approved gurdwara, its name, address, place, pin, website and public phone go on the map, shared openly as you agreed when sending. Your email and your notes are never published. A book suggestion publishes nothing by itself: if it belongs, we write its entry ourselves.
How long we keep it. An automatic daily job enforces this: your email and any notes (or the reason you gave for a book) are erased 30 days after we approve the entry; a rejected entry is deleted altogether 30 days after we reject it; an entry nobody has reviewed loses its email and notes after 180 days. What stays is the public gurdwara record you agreed to share, and the title and author of an accepted book. Cloudflare may keep its own backups of the database for a time we do not control.
"Use where I am" on the gurdwara form asks your browser for your location only when you tap it, and only to fill in the pin fields in front of you. Nothing is sent until you press send, and you can change or clear the pin first.
Want an entry or your email removed sooner? Write to the address below and we will delete it.
If you email us
The correction links on this site open your own mail client addressed to contact@missionsikhism.org. Nothing is sent until you choose to send it.
If you do write, we hold your message and address for as long as it takes to deal with it and to credit a contribution. We do not add you to any list, because there isn't one. Ask us to delete your correspondence and we will.
Children
The site is suitable for all ages. Reading it collects nothing from anyone. The two forms ask for nothing personal: the email box is optional, and a young reader can leave it empty. Like every visitor, a child's request is seen by our host as described under Hosting.
Your rights
Data protection law — the UK and EU GDPR among others — gives you rights to access, correct and erase personal data held about you. What we hold is what you chose to send us (an email address, or a name or note you put in a form or an email) and, for up to a day, the hourly counter code described above, which we could only match to you if you told us your address. Our host also handles request data as described under Hosting. Write to the address above to exercise any of this.
Changes
If the site ever starts collecting something new, this page changes first and says so plainly. Last changed 27 October 2026: the search wording was corrected (a search can reach our host in the fallback cases above) and retention periods were stated for form submissions. Before that, 23 October 2026, when visit counting (Cloudflare Web Analytics) was switched on, and 6 October 2026, when the gurdwara and book forms arrived.