Cookie policy

Cookies are small files a site stores in your browser. We use as few as the site can function with, and none of them follow you across the web.

Strictly necessary

These make the site work. They cannot be switched off, and they do not require consent because without them there is no service.

• Session and authentication — keeps you signed in as you move between pages. Set only after you log in, and cleared when you log out.
• Security — protects forms against cross-site request forgery and helps us block automated abuse.
• Theme preference — remembers whether you chose light or dark so the page does not flash the wrong one on every visit.

Analytics

We measure readership two ways, and only one of them can set anything in your browser. Neither is used to identify you, and you can switch the one that sets cookies off in one click.

• Our own counters — no cookie, no identifier, nothing stored in your browser at all. We count that a page was read, not who read it, so there is nothing that could be joined back to you and nothing to consent to.
• Google Analytics — runs on every page and is on by default. It sets _ga cookies, which last up to two years and let it tell a returning reader from a new one. We rely on legitimate interest for this rather than asking you first, because it measures readership and nothing else — and you can switch it off at any time in your settings. Off, it goes cookieless immediately: nothing stored, and nothing that can recognise you between pages or between visits.

Either way we ask Google for measurement only. Advertising features, ad personalisation and Google Signals are switched off in our configuration and are never switched on by your agreeing — so nothing here reaches an advertiser, and no profile is built about you.

What we do not set

No advertising cookies. No cross-site tracking pixels. No data brokers. Nothing sold to anyone.

When you follow a link to a retailer, that retailer may set its own cookies to record that you arrived from us — this is how affiliate commission is attributed, and it is described in our affiliate disclosure.

Those cookies are the retailer’s, set on the retailer’s site, governed by the retailer’s policy. We cannot read them and we do not receive your order contents back.

• Analytics — one switch in your settings, on by default, off whenever you want it off. It takes effect immediately, in every tab, without a reload, and the choice is remembered. We do not put a cookie banner in front of you to ask: a switch that is always in the same place is a better control than a bar that appears once and then never again.
• Everything else — your browser can block or clear cookies for this site at any time. Blocking the strictly necessary ones will sign you out and keep you signed out.

Refusing analytics costs you nothing here. There is no paywall, no degraded experience, and no repeated nagging. If you would rather we did not measure you at all, the switch is the whole of it — there is nothing else to find.