Cookie Policy

What a cookie actually is

A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to store, so that the next request your browser makes carries something the site can recognise. Most of ours hold nothing more than a random string. On their own those strings say very little about you. Joined to enough other records by companies that do exactly that for a living, they can say a great deal, which is the honest reason this page exists.

Two close relatives of the cookie do similar work and are treated the same way here. Local storage keeps values in your browser without attaching them to every request, and we use it to remember your consent choice and your light or dark preference. Pixels, sometimes called tags, are tiny invisible files whose only job is to be requested, which tells a server that a page or an advertisement loaded. Your consent covers all three.

The four kinds we use

Everything set on this site falls into one of four buckets, and only the first is exempt from asking you first. We keep the count at four on purpose, because a category list long enough to look thorough is usually a category list nobody has actually audited.

Strictly necessary. Load balancing, security and abuse protection, and remembering that you already answered the banner. These run without consent because the site cannot be delivered without them.
Preferences. Light or dark mode, text size, notices you have already dismissed. Losing these breaks nothing except your patience.
Analytics. Counting readers and pages, seeing whether anyone reached the end of a long story, and telling a genuine surge on a big story from an automated script.
Advertising. Set by the ad server and the exchanges that fill our advertising slots. They limit how often you see the same advertisement, measure whether it was actually visible, detect click fraud, and, where you have consented, select advertisements from a profile built elsewhere.

The advertising bucket is what pays for the reporting, and it is the only one we would drop tomorrow if the money worked another way, a point our ownership and funding page makes as well.

Who else sets cookies here

We set very few ourselves. Most come from third parties, which we describe by category: the delivery network that gets pages to you quickly, our analytics provider, the ad server and the programmatic exchanges bidding into our advertising slots with their own downstream partners, our newsletter provider, and occasionally an embedded video or map inside a story.

We will not print a vendor list in prose, because ours changes and a stale list published confidently is worse than no list at all. The consent manager holds the current one, with the companies named, what each says it does, and the legal basis it claims. If a name in there worries you, refuse that vendor and read the site anyway. Nothing you came for is withheld.

Personalised advertising, and what changes if you refuse

With your consent, the exchanges may use an identifier to select advertisements based on what has been inferred about you across other sites and apps. Refuse, and we serve contextual advertising instead: advertisements chosen by what the page is about and roughly where in the world the request came from, with no profile involved. A story about a new phone gets technology advertising because of the story, not because of you.

Refusing costs you nothing here. No article is withheld, no counter starts running, and the banner does not reappear three paragraphs later wearing a different hat. It does cost us money, because non-personalised advertising pays less, and we would rather say that out loud than hide the trade behind a pre-ticked box. Advertisers are told the same thing, which our advertise page spells out.

Changing your answer whenever you like

Your consent is not a door that locks behind you. The consent manager reopens from the footer link on every page, shows what you chose last time, and lets you switch any category or any single vendor on or off. A withdrawal takes effect on the next page you load. Readers in California will find the Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information control in the same place, and we honour the Global Privacy Control signal.

Browser controls sit underneath all of that and outrank us. Every current browser can block third-party cookies, clear what is stored for a site, or refuse cookies entirely, usually under a privacy or site settings menu, and private browsing windows discard the lot when you close them. Blocking everything will also erase the memory of your consent choice, which means the banner will greet you on every visit, an irony we have not found a way around.

The advertising industry also runs its own opt-out pages, which cover many companies at once rather than only this site. The Digital Advertising Alliance runs youradchoices.com, the Network Advertising Initiative runs optout.networkadvertising.org, and European readers have youronlinechoices.eu. Those pages set their own opt-out cookies, so clearing your cookies wipes the opt-out along with everything else.

How long they last, and what to read next

Session cookies die when you close the browser. Our consent record is kept for up to six months and then we ask again, because a choice made a year ago is not a current answer. Preference values persist until you clear them, analytics identifiers are set for up to fourteen months, and advertising cookies run from a day to about two years depending on the vendor. The exact figure for each one lives in the consent manager rather than here, where it would go stale.

What happens to the data once it is collected, who receives it and the rights you hold over it are covered in our privacy policy. Questions go to support@webwizard360.com with PRIVACY at the front of the subject line, and other ways to reach the desk are on our contact page. If you are unsure what is running right now, open the consent manager and check before you take our word for it.