Cookie policy

What cookies are

A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to store, and which the browser returns on later visits. They allow sites to remember state. They are also the mechanism most online advertising relies on, which is why they attract specific legal attention in Europe, the United Kingdom and a few other jurisdictions.

What this site uses

Strictly necessary

This site sets no cookies. It has no accounts, no login and no shopping cart, so there is nothing that needs to be remembered between visits.

Local storage (not a cookie, but stored the same way)

Two small preferences are kept in your browser's local storage on your own device. Neither is transmitted to us, neither identifies you, and clearing your browser data removes both.

• Theme preference. If you switch between light and dark mode, the choice is saved as theme so the site does not flash the wrong colours on your next visit. Nothing else uses it.
• Consent record. When advertising is enabled, your consent choices are stored locally as anikaay-consent-v1. It stays on your device. We have no server to send it to.

Analytics

This site runs no analytics. There is no Google Analytics, Plausible, Fathom or equivalent script. We do not know which pages you read, how long you stayed, or where you arrived from.

Advertising cookies

Advertising is currently disabled on this site (ADS_ENABLED is not set to true). When it is enabled, third-party advertising technology — currently Google AdSense — sets cookies to serve, target and measure advertising.

That technology may set and read cookies including:

• Ad cookies. Used by Google to serve and measure ads, prevent repeated impressions of the same ad, and limit how often an advertiser can show an ad.
• Advertising partner cookies. Google's ad partners may set cookies to serve ads based on a reader's prior visits to this or other sites.
• Personalisation cookies. Where consent permits it, used to select ads based on your activity and inferred interests.

Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads based on your visits to this and other sites. You can opt out of personalised advertising at Google Ads Settings, and learn more about how Google uses data from sites that use its services at Google's partner-sites policy.

Verify before enabling advertising

Those descriptions cover Google AdSense as it behaves today. They are not a substitute for checking Google's current documentation at the time advertising is switched on, and for a specific legal review of the disclosures required in the jurisdictions the site is read from. Advertising is not enabled precisely because that work has not been done.

Consent

Where the law requires prior consent for advertising cookies — currently the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland among others — the site sets Google Consent Mode defaults to denied before any advertising script loads, so non-personalised advertising is the starting position rather than the exception.

The site provides the technical interface for a consent management platform, but it does not display a consent banner of its own. A banner is only appropriate once a real consent platform is configured and the legal basis for each purpose is settled. Until then, no banner is shown and no personalisation signal is granted.

How to control or delete stored data

You have direct control, without needing us:

• Delete site data. Clearing cookies and site data for this domain in your browser settings removes the theme preference and the consent record.
• Change your mind about consent. Once a consent interface is available, it will provide a way to withdraw or change your choice as easily as to give it.
• Block third-party cookies. Your browser can block cookies from advertising domains entirely. The article content on this site continues to work; only the advertising is affected.

Blocking advertising cookies does not degrade this site. Articles, navigation, search and every other feature work identically with advertising blocked.

Server logs

Whoever hosts this site keeps ordinary web server logs — IP address, timestamp, requested URL, user agent — for security and to keep the service running. Those are managed by the hosting provider under its own policy. We do not use them to build a profile of any reader.

Changes

If this site's data practices change, this page will be updated to describe what the site actually does. If advertising is ever enabled, this page will say so before it happens.

Contact

Questions about cookies and consent: editorial@anikaay.site or the contact page. The privacy policy covers the wider question of what we do with information.