Cookies

This site sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser. What that means, what is used instead, and how to verify it yourself.

Photo: theglassdesk / Pixabay
Photo: lucasgeorgewendt / Pixabay

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This site sets no cookies. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to, and no “manage preferences” screen because there are no preferences to manage.

That is not a policy we promise to keep — it is how the site is made. Every page is a plain HTML file written out before you asked for it, served from one server that is ours.

A cookie is a small value a site asks your browser to keep and hand back on every later request. It is what makes a shopping basket survive a page load, and it is what lets an advertising network recognise you on a site that has nothing to do with the one that set it.

Sites need them for sessions, for preferences and for tracking. This site has no accounts to keep you signed in to, no basket, and nothing it wants to follow you with — so it sets none, and the question does not arise.

Nothing else is stored either

A cookie is only one of the places a site can leave something behind. None of the others is used here:

No localStorage or sessionStorage. Your theme, your language and your scroll position are not remembered, because nothing writes them.
No IndexedDB and no Cache Storage. There is no offline copy of this site on your device.
No service worker. Nothing from this site runs in the background, before you open it or after you close it. The install page explains what adding this site to a home screen does and does not do.
No fingerprinting. Nothing measures your fonts, your canvas, your screen or your clock to build an identifier out of them.
No third-party anything. No analytics tag, no tracking pixel, no embedded fonts, no map widget, no video player, no social button. Not one request leaves for another company’s server.

Zero JavaScript runs on this site. The complete lists, links and menus use HTML, CSS and the browser’s own controls. Public page totals are updated on the server from its masked log; the counter writes nothing in your browser and sends no additional tracking request.

You do not have to believe a word of this page — the next section shows you how to check.

Every other site asking for your consent could have done the same and chose not to.

Check it yourself

You do not have to take our word for any of this, and it takes about ten seconds:

Open your browser’s developer tools, go to Application (or Storage) and look at Cookies, Local Storage and Session Storage for this site. Every one of the three lists ends where it begins.
Open the Network panel and reload. Count the hosts it talks to: there is one, and it is ours.
Or read the page’s source. Everything that renders is in it.

If you would rather read it from a terminal, the command-line page shows how to fetch any page of this site as plain Markdown and see exactly what it contains.

What is recorded instead

Something has to answer the question “is anyone reading this”, and here it is the server’s own access log rather than anything in your browser. Each line holds the page requested, whether it worked, your browser’s self-description, the site you came from if you followed a link, and a network address with its last part replaced by zeroes before the line is written. Lines live about thirty days.

The whole of that — what is kept, for how long, what outlives it, and the two things we think are worth being precise about — is on the privacy page.

If this ever changes

It would take a change to how the site is built, not a change to a setting, and it would be published here and on the privacy page in the same commit, in every language, before it reached anyone. There is no version of this site that quietly starts storing something.

Questions this page does not answer go to a person — ask us directly.