Cookie Policy

This page describes what the site actually does. It is not legal advice — have the wording reviewed for the jurisdictions you operate in.

Your rights under the GDPR

Where the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the UK GDPR applies to you, cookies and similar technologies that are not strictly necessary may only be used with your consent, and that consent must be freely given, specific, informed and as easy to withdraw as it was to give. This site is built to that standard:

• Nothing non-essential runs until you agree. No analytics or advertising cookies are set before you choose.
• Consent is granular. You can agree to analytics without agreeing to advertising, or neither. Nothing is pre-ticked.
• Refusing is as easy as agreeing — one click, in the same place, at the same size.
• You can withdraw at any time from the Cookie settings link in the footer of every page, without penalty and without losing access to anything.
• We keep a record of which categories you agreed to and when, so consent can be demonstrated. That record lives in your browser, not on a server.

Your broader rights over personal data — access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection, and complaint to a supervisory authority — are covered in the Privacy Policy.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files stored on your device that help sites remember your preferences (like your chosen theme). This policy also covers similar technologies such as localStorage, which is where your theme and consent choices are actually kept.

Cookies we use

These are the same three categories you see in the consent panel.

• Strictly necessary — always on. Security and load balancing, plus remembering the theme, palette and font you chose and the cookie choice itself. These are stored locally in your browser and are never used to track you.
• Analytics — Google Analytics 4, and Google Tag Manager where it is used to deploy it. These measure which pages get read and where readers arrive from.
• Advertising — Google AdSense.

What happens when you say no

Declining does not simply leave a gap in a chart. The analytics and advertising tags run in what Google calls consent mode: while you have not consented, they are forbidden from setting or reading cookies and from using advertising identifiers, and they send only anonymous, cookieless signals that cannot be tied to you or to a returning visit. Google uses those aggregate signals to estimate overall traffic. Advertising identifiers are additionally redacted, and where a link carries an ad click ID it is passed in the URL rather than stored on your device.

In short: saying no means no cookies and no identification — not that the site stops counting page views in aggregate.

Where we ask, and where we assume

Rules differ by country, so what happens on your first visit depends on where you are.

• In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland — where the GDPR, UK GDPR and the ePrivacy rules require prior consent — no analytics or advertising cookies are set until you agree. You will see the consent banner on your first visit.
• Everywhere else, analytics and advertising are on by default and you can switch them off at any time using the link below.

Your country is determined at our server’s edge from the network connection, and the only thing recorded from it is which of those two groups you fall into. If it cannot be determined, you are treated as being in the first group — the one that asks first.

Your choice, and changing it

You can change or withdraw your choice at any time using the Cookie settings link in the footer of every page, wherever you are. Withdrawing takes effect immediately for anything set afterwards; to clear cookies already stored, use your browser’s settings.

We record which categories you agreed to and when, so we can show that consent was given. That record is stored in your browser, not on a server.