Nothing but strictly necessary cookies is set until you say yes. Everyone sees the consent banner before any advertising cookie exists, not only visitors in the EEA or the UK, and you can change your answer whenever you like.
The cookies
| Name | Set by | Type | Lasts | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
cc_sid | Corteiz Community | Necessary | 12 months | A random identifier so your votes, likes and favourites are yours and the same browser cannot vote or like twice on one item. Holds nothing but a random string. It is not used to count visits. |
cc_cur | Corteiz Community | Necessary | 12 months | Remembers whether you chose to see prices in £, € or $, so the site does not reset to the wrong currency on every page. Holds three letters and nothing else. |
__Host-cc_admin, __Host-cc_admin_2fa | Corteiz Community | Necessary | 12 hours (5 minutes for the second one) | Only set for the site administrator when signed into the admin panel, which lives on its own address, separate from this site. The second one only lasts for the two-step sign-in. Never set for visitors. |
Restock alerts | Corteiz Community | Necessary | Until you turn them off | Not a cookie: a push address your browser generates, stored so we can notify you. Only if you enable alerts. |
cf_clearance, __cf_bm | Cloudflare | Necessary | 30 min – 1 year | Bot protection and the Turnstile check that runs when you vote. Set by Cloudflare, our delivery and security provider. |
__gads, __gpi, IDE, test_cookie | Google AdSense | Advertising | Up to 13 months | Ad delivery, frequency capping and measurement. Only set once you accept advertising cookies. |
FCCDCF | Necessary | Up to 13 months | Set by Google’s privacy-messaging library, which loads as part of AdSense. It records the state of your consent choice. It is set whether you accept or decline, because its job is to remember the choice itself. | |
_ga, _ga_* | Google Analytics | Analytics | Up to 2 years | Counts visitors and tells us which pages people actually read, how they got here and which items get voted on. Only set once you accept analytics cookies; declined, the code runs but stores nothing. |
Strictly necessary
These make the site work and cannot be switched off from here. Under EU law they do not
require consent because you cannot have the feature without them: without
cc_sid there is no way to know that a vote is yours, and without
Cloudflare's cookies the anti-bot check cannot run.
Advertising
Google AdSense is configured on this site for verification. Google and its partners may use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this and other sites. You can:
- Turn off personalised ads at Google Ads Settings.
- Opt out of participating third-party vendors at aboutads.info or Your Online Choices.
- Read how Google uses data at google.com/policies/technologies/partner-sites.
Analytics
We use Google Analytics to see how many people reach the site and which pages are worth writing more of. It only stores anything once you accept analytics cookies: decline and the code stays loaded but sets no cookie and creates no identifier, which is how Google's consent signals work.
When you vote, Analytics also receives a vote event: which item, up or
down, and the kind of page you voted from. It carries nothing from our own records
(not the cc_sid cookie, which never leaves our servers), so it
cannot be joined to the vote we keep. Favourites and alerts are not sent at all.
The privacy policy has the detail.
If you accept, Google may also use what Analytics collects to build advertising audiences and personalise the ads you see. Accepting covers both; the opt-outs under Advertising above apply here too.
Measurement that sets no cookies
Two things measure this site without storing anything in your browser, so they are not in the table above and there is nothing to accept or refuse:
- Cloudflare Web Analytics. How fast pages load for real visitors. Cookieless: no identifier, no following you between visits.
- Our own article counters. How many times an article was read, and how many times someone pressed one of its share buttons, whether in the rows on the article itself or in the share window they open, added up by day and country, and for shares also by which network. No cookie, no identifier, and nothing written per visit: what exists is a number that goes up. Explained in full in the privacy policy.
The country behind those counters comes from the header Cloudflare adds to a request and, when that is missing, from a database of IP ranges held on our own server: IP Geolocation by DB-IP, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Nothing is stored in your browser to do it, your address is not sent anywhere, and it is not kept. Requests arriving over Tor get no country at all: either Cloudflare tells us, or we check the address against the Tor Project's published list of exit relays, which we download to our own server and refresh daily. Where that list cannot speak for an address, we store no country for that request either, rather than risk storing a relay's.
Google Tag Manager also appears on every page. It sets no cookies and collects nothing on its own: it is the container that loads Google Analytics, which is in the table above.
What we do not use
No Facebook pixel, no heatmaps, no session recording, no cross-site profiling of our own. The share buttons, the ones in the rows on the article and the ones in our own share window alike, are plain links: they load nothing from those networks and set nothing until you press one, and then it is that network's own page doing it. We do count the press on our own server, wherever you pressed it: which article, which network, the day and the country, added up. That count uses no cookie and no identifier.
Your choice
Loading your current choice…
The choice is stored in this browser only, and you can change it here as many times as you like. It is not a cookie: it lives in your browser's local storage, so it never travels with a request.
Turning cookies off
Every browser lets you block or delete cookies, usually under Settings → Privacy. Blocking the necessary ones will stop voting and favourites from working; nothing else breaks. Clearing them also detaches your browser from anything we have stored, which is the fastest way to be forgotten.
More detail on what is stored and for how long is in our privacy policy. Questions about cookies, or a request to delete what is attached to yours: contact@corteizcommunity.com.