Privacy Policy

This privacy policy applies to nipscern.com, operated by NIPS-CERN, the Center for Instrumentation and Signal Processing. The group works from two laboratories: NIPS, at UFJF, in Juiz de Fora, Brazil, and Route Salam, at CERN, in Switzerland.

Nothing on this site asks who you are. There is no account, no login, and no registration or contact form. Two things still leave your browser, and both are set out below.

Analytics (GoatCounter): We use GoatCounter to count page visits and understand traffic patterns. GoatCounter:

• Does not use cookies.
• Does not collect personally identifiable information (no name, email, or device fingerprint).
• Records only aggregated counts: page URL, referrer, browser family, country (derived from anonymised IP; the full IP address is never stored), and screen size category.
• Is fully GDPR-compliant and requires no cookie consent banner.

You can review GoatCounter's own privacy policy at goatcounter.com/help/privacy.

Hearts on news posts. Pressing the heart on a post sends a request to a small service of ours running on Cloudflare Workers. It stores a count per post, and one row per post and device to keep the same device from voting twice. The device is written as SHA-256(IP address | browser string | secret salt): the address itself is never stored and the hash cannot be turned back into one. Nothing is stored if you do not press the heart.

Problem reports from AURORA (SAPHO). The AURORA IDE has a "Report a problem" panel. Nothing is ever sent automatically: a report goes out only when the person writes a description and presses send, after reading, on that same screen, exactly what will travel with it. A report carries the text the person wrote and a short diagnostic block: AURORA version, operating system version, core count and memory size, runtime versions, and the last lines of AURORA's own log. The Windows account name is removed from file paths before sending. Even so, a log line may still indirectly identify a person or a machine, for example through a project folder named after its owner. The panel also has an optional e-mail field; an address given there is used only to reply about that report, and nothing else. We treat these reports under the LGPD (Brazilian law 13.709/2018): they are used only to investigate the reported problem, are visible only to the NIPS-CERN team, and are deleted on request through the contact below. The receiving service keeps no access log of its own; for rate limiting it holds, for a few minutes, only a salted hash of the sender's IP address, which is never stored in the report.

This website keeps three first-party cookie-equivalents, all of them localStorage keys and all of them in your browser: nipscern_lang holds your chosen language, nipscern_anim holds whether you asked for the animations on the projects grid to run, and nipscern:hearts:liked holds the news posts you have marked, so the heart stays filled when you come back.

We do not use advertising cookies, tracking cookies, or third-party analytics cookies.

The following external services are loaded when you visit this website. Each has its own privacy policy.

• GitHub: project links point to github.com. GitHub's privacy practices apply when you navigate to those pages. See GitHub Privacy Statement.
• CERN Courier: PDF links point to cerncourier.com, operated by CERN. CERN's privacy practices apply.
• Cloudflare: the heart on a news post is counted by a small service of ours running on Cloudflare Workers, and the site's heavier files are served from cdn.nipscern.com. Cloudflare sees those requests the way any host sees a request. See the Cloudflare privacy policy.

GoatCounter keeps aggregated counts and nothing that points at a visitor, so there is no individual record there to remove.

The hearts table keeps one row per post and device for as long as the count stands. The device is written as a hash, and a hash cannot be worked back to a person, which also means we cannot pick out one reader's row on request. Clearing nipscern:hearts:liked in your browser clears your side of it.

Under the Brazilian Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD) and the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you have rights of access, correction and deletion over personal data held about you. What we hold ourselves is set out in sections 2 and 5, and none of it is tied to a name or an account. Those rights apply to anything processed by the third-party services listed above, and to us: write to us and we will answer.

This website is intended for university students, researchers, and the general public interested in particle physics. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13.

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. The date of the most recent update appears at the top of this page. Continued use of the website after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

Questions about this privacy policy can be directed to the NIPS-CERN group. See the About page for contact information.