What this site stores on your device. Nothing, until you say so.

What cookies are

A cookie is a small piece of text a website asks your browser to keep, so the site can recognise you or remember something about you next time. Websites must tell you about the cookies they set, and for most kinds, ask first.

What this website sets when you say no

Nothing. No cookies of any kind. The one thing kept is your answer: a small record in your browser's own storage, called hb-consent, so we do not ask you again on every page. It holds a yes or a no for each of the two choices and the time you chose, nothing else, and it stays until you change it or clear your browser. There is no login and no basket, so nothing here needs a cookie to work. The one other thing this site can keep is a conversation with Nova, the chat, and only once you open it, as set out below.

What this website sets when you choose Measure visits

Google Analytics. It counts visits: which pages are read, how people arrived, roughly where in the world they are, and what kind of device and browser they use. It sets two cookies.

• _ga, kept for two years, a random number that tells one visitor from another.
• _ga_ followed by our property id, kept for two years, which keeps the pages of one visit together.

Google signals and personalised advertising are switched off, so nothing is used to build a profile of you or to show you adverts anywhere. We keep Google's event data for the shortest period Google offers, two months.

What this website sets when you choose Advertising

Advertising lets Google Ads tell us which of our adverts lead to enquiries. With Measure visits also chosen, Google Analytics passes your visit, and the fact that an enquiry was sent, to our Google Ads account, and Google may set cookies whose names begin _gcl_, chiefly _gcl_au and _gcl_aw, kept for up to ninety days, which remember that you arrived from one of our adverts. On its own, without Measure visits, Advertising sends nothing to Google.

If you arrived from one of our adverts, the reference in the address you landed on, the utm_ tags and the gclid that Google adds, is kept in your browser's session storage as hb-attribution, for that tab only, and added to the foot of any enquiry you send, so we know which advert brought it. It goes when you close the tab or take Advertising away.

Personalised advertising stays off whatever you choose. Nothing from this site is used to show you adverts elsewhere, and there is no remarketing.

Third parties

When you choose Measure visits, requests leave this site for Google, for the measuring script, and the counts go to Google's servers. With Advertising as well, Google's advertising hosts receive the visit and enquiry counts described above. Google LLC is in the United States; the transfer is covered by the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and by Google's data processing terms, which apply to us as a Google Analytics and Google Ads customer. When you say no, your browser makes no request to any third party: no analytics, no font service, no advertising tag, no embedded video, no social widget. The typeface is served from our own host.

The banner and what the buttons do

Accept all switches on Measure visits and Advertising. Reject all keeps everything off and, if an earlier visit set Google's cookies or kept an advert reference, deletes them. Choose shows the two ticks, and Save my choice keeps what you ticked. Accept and Reject sit side by side and each is one click. The banner does not block the page and does not come back once you have chosen.

Changing your mind

Cookie settings, at the foot of every page, opens the banner again with your current answer shown. Change it and the change takes effect at once, on this page and every other. With JavaScript switched off the banner never appears, nothing is measured, and that link brings you here.

The contact form and the newsletter

Sending an enquiry or giving us your address for The Wire weekly sets nothing on your device. If you have chosen Advertising and arrived from one of our adverts, the advert reference described above goes with your enquiry. What happens to the details you type is covered by the privacy notice.

Nova, the chat

Opening Nova, the chat at the foot of every page, sets no cookie. The conversation is kept in your browser's session storage as hb-chat, and the details you gave on the card before the chat as hb-chat-who, for that tab only, so that the chat carries on from page to page, greets you by name and can send a copy of the conversation to our inbox when it ends, and both go when you close the tab. If you choose Write to us with Add this conversation ticked, the conversation is also held for a moment as hb-chat-carry, until the contact form has put it into your message, and then removed. All three exist only to make the chat you opened work, so none waits for the cookie banner. The card's details leave your browser when you press Start the chat, the conversation and your first name go with each question you ask, and a copy of the conversation goes to our inbox, with the card's details, when the chat ends; what happens to them then is covered by the privacy notice.

Check it yourself

You do not have to take our word for any of this. Open your browser's developer tools on any page of this site and look at the cookies, storage and network panels. Before you choose, and after Reject all: no cookies, one storage entry once you have answered, and no request to any host but ours. After Accept all: Google's cookies, requests to googletagmanager.com and google-analytics.com, requests to Google's advertising hosts once our Google Ads account is linked, and, if you came from one of our adverts, the hb-attribution entry in session storage. Whatever you choose, once you have opened Nova you will see hb-chat in session storage, each question you ask going to this site's own /api/chat, and, when the chat ends, its copy going to this site's own /api/enquiry.php, and to no other host.

If this ever changes

If anything else ever needs to store something, this page is updated first to say what it is, what it does and how long it lasts, and where consent is required we ask before anything is set, not after. The date at the top changes with it.