Cookie policy

A small file a site stores in your browser so it can recognise that browser on a later visit. It gives no access to your files or your camera; it is used to count visits, remember a preference and pick an ad.

Some are set by us, others by companies that deliver part of the page — that is the case for the ads, the map and the video player.

At the end of a page about a specific place there is a Google map. It only loads when you scroll down to it, and it is Google that decides what it stores in your browser when that happens — exactly as if you had opened Google Maps yourself. We send the map nothing but the name of the place the page is about.

The video is embedded through YouTube no-tracking-cookie domain, which only sets a cookie once you press play. Neither is needed to read the page: block both and every figure and every paragraph is still there.

This site has Portuguese, English, Spanish, French, German and Italian versions and serves readers in the European Union. In those regions, and in the United Kingdom and Switzerland, personalised advertising may only be shown with consent collected by a platform certified under the industry framework. That is why a prompt appears there before anything else — and your answer counts: refuse it and the ads remain, without personalisation.

That prompt is not built by us, and could not be: it is Google own consent platform, switched on in the ads dashboard. A home-made banner is not certified and would not do.

Outside those regions you can turn personalisation off at any time in your Google account ad settings or through the industry opt-out tools listed on the privacy page.

Every browser can delete stored cookies and block new ones, per site or in general. Look for "cookies" or "site data" in your browser settings.

Blocking everything does not break this site: you can still read every page, with every table and every figure. What may stop working is the map, the embedded video and the audience count.