It always annoys me when I arrive at a new website and I receive immediately a series of pop-up windows:
Nevertheless this website is not only obliged to publish this information as a website hosted in the EU, but the users - you - also deserve to know what is happening.
This is a private, railway enthusiast homepage with no commercial content - not a single advertisement is placed here. So, we do not collect personal data, and we do not give away this nonexistent data. To browse the site, to enjoy the small vehicle pictures and the animated scenes no data is requested from you.
The server collects the IP addresses from where it is accessed for statistical purposes. The data is not evaluated yet - there are more important things for WTraffic and the Picture Collection to implement first - but a statistic divided according to countries, regions is planned to be shown some time.
Of course the site uses a few cookies to store your choices, how you want to see the pages - especially on mobile devices (for example, to honor the minimal distance of the 'clickable' areas required by Google, or to enable to have links closer to each other, as a typical fingertip's size). As the site users are not identified, not followed (WTraffic and the Picture Collection don't use session cookies), the only way to store such personal choices is on the user's computer, and cookies are the simplest among all.
WTraffic uses an other mechanism to remember, where the scenes stay in the timetable file, how much is already shown, and which timetable lines are to run in the future. In order to minimize the data transferred at each server request, the WTraffic state - the timetable line index, if the lines are running in their original order, or the set of the already executed timetable lines, if the 'Random sequence' mode is used, separatly for each $SEGMENT / $GROUP / $SCENE / $PATH / $POOL is stored in the browser's local storage, and only the actually used ones are sent to the server embedded in the data communication. There are several thousand such $SEGMENT / $POOL / etc. blocks, so to have so much cookies and always send them over is not a real possibility.
If you are interested, what information is stored on your computer by this site, open the developer tools window
(for example by choosing the Inspect context menu item on a page from this site), and choose the Storage tab on Firefox,
but similar possibilities (often with identical or similar names and user interfaces) exist in the
other main browsers: Chrome, Edge, Opera too.
There is a Log in to cooperate menu entry, or the lock icon in the header of the most pages.
To acquire a username and to log in is needed only for people, who would like to contribute,
to help to extend or to correct the vehicle set, the scenes or the accompanying information.
See the How to contribute page about the ways to help to improve this website.