Cookie Policy

1. What cookies are

Cookies are small text files placed on your device when you visit a website. They let the site remember your actions and preferences over time, and are widely used to make services work or work more efficiently.

2. Categories we use

We use strictly-necessary cookies for authentication, security, and session management — these are required for the Service to function and cannot be switched off. Where enabled on a given deployment, we may also use preferences and analytics cookies to remember choices and understand usage.

These categories describe cookies and other storage on your device. They are what a consent control governs. Measurement that uses no device storage at all falls outside them — see Section 3.

3. Page-view measurement without cookies

This platform counts its own page views with a first-party counter that sets no cookie, writes nothing to your device, and reads nothing from it. It runs on the deployment's own servers; no third-party analytics provider, pixel, tag or SDK is involved, and the data does not leave the deployment.

What it records per page view: the page path (the query string is not stored as such); utm_source / utm_medium / utm_campaign where the link carried them; the host name only of the referring site, never the full referring address; the display language; a UTC date and time; and a visitor hash — a SHA-256 value computed from a random daily salt, your IP address and your user-agent string.

What it does not do, each enforced in the software rather than merely promised:

• it sets no cookie and writes nothing to localStorage, sessionStorage or IndexedDB;
• it reads nothing from your device — no stored identifier, no device or browser fingerprint;
• it never stores your IP address and never logs it; the IP is used to compute the hash and is then discarded;
• the daily salt is random, is held only on the server, and is deleted after two days (a day's salt is kept for that day and the two that follow), after which nobody holding the database can work out which IP produced a past hash;
• because that salt changes daily, no identifier spans days: the counter measures daily unique visitors and cannot recognise a returning visitor or build a profile;
• traffic identified as automated (bots and crawlers) is discarded rather than recorded.

How long it is kept: page-view rows are deleted automatically after a retention period the deployment configures, 365 days by default.

Why it is not behind a consent control. The consent requirement for cookies comes from Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive (2002/58/EC) and the national laws implementing it, and it attaches to one event: storing information in, or gaining access to information already stored in, a user's terminal equipment. The counter does neither, so there is no storage or access for consent to attach to. That does not put it outside data-protection law: forming the visitor hash uses your IP address and user-agent, which is governed by the GDPR and rests on legitimate interest under Art. 6(1)(f) — see the Privacy Policy.

A note on what an "analytics" consent category means here. Where a deployment offers an analytics category in a consent banner, that category governs analytics that use cookies or other device storage. Switching it off does not switch off the cookieless counter described in this section, because that counter is not a cookie and the banner does not govern it. The count is sent by a script on the page, so a browser that does not run that script records no page view.

4. Third-party cookies

Some cookies are set by third parties whose services a given deployment integrates — for example payment checkout, error tracking, maps, or embedded content. These depend on which integrations are enabled and are governed by the respective providers' own policies.

5. Managing cookies

Most browsers let you view, block, or delete cookies through their settings. Blocking strictly-necessary cookies may break parts of the Service. Where non-essential cookies are used, a "Cookie settings" control is available so you can manage your choices.

6. Related policies

For details on how we handle personal data more generally, see our Privacy Policy.

7. Changes

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be communicated by email and via the platform with reasonable notice.

This is a placeholder Cookie Policy for an early-stage product. Replace it before commercial launch with counsel-reviewed text — see docs/runbooks/legal-pages.md. Section 3 describes software that actually ships, so if you replace this file, carry that disclosure into whatever replaces it.