Cookies and Local Storage

Google Analytics

Google Analytics 4 loads through Google Tag Manager on every page and sets two first party cookies, which let it tell one visit apart from another and understand whether a visit is new or continuing:

What we do with it is genuinely dull. We look at which guides get read, which of the free tools get used, and which pages people leave immediately, and then we fix the weak ones. We do not look up individuals, and Google Analytics is not built to let us.

What we have switched off, on purpose

Google Signals and every advertising feature are disabled on this property, and the advertising consent signals (ad_storage, ad_user_data, ad_personalization) are hard set to denied on every page of this website. In plain terms:

• No advertising or remarketing cookie is ever set here.
• Your visit is never added to an audience list for ads.
• Nothing here follows you around other websites.
• Your data is not used to personalise advertising anywhere.

How to opt out

No account needed and no form to fill in. Any one of these works:

• Install Google's official opt out add on. It is free, it comes from Google, and it stops Google Analytics on every website you visit, not just ours. Search for "Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on".
• Use any content blocker. uBlock Origin, Ghostery, Brave's built in shields and most privacy extensions all block it. Nothing on this site needs analytics to work, so the site behaves exactly the same.
• Turn on your browser's tracking protection. Firefox, Safari and Brave block a good deal of this by default already.
• Clear the cookies. Clearing site data for this website removes them, though they will be set again on your next visit unless you use one of the options above.

You can also write to nrivaluers@gmail.com and ask us to delete analytics data associated with you. We will need enough detail to identify the records, which is genuinely difficult with aggregated analytics, and we will tell you honestly what we could and could not do.

The one thing we store ourselves

Separately from Google, we save a single value in your browser's local storage:

That is local storage rather than a cookie. It stays in your browser, is not sent with page requests the way a cookie is, contains nothing about you, and we cannot read it from our side.

Two other things your browser talks to

Google Fonts

Our typefaces load from Google's font service, so your browser makes a request to Google, which reveals your IP address and browser to them. If that matters to you, a content blocker will stop it and the site will fall back to a system font and remain fully readable.

Our host

This site is hosted on Vercel. Like any web server, it records a log of requests including IP address, browser type, page requested and time. That is standard operation and security logging, kept for a short rolling period, and it is not used to profile you or to advertise to you.

Links out

When you follow a link to a government portal, a bank, or any other site, that site's own cookie and privacy practices take over. We have no control over them and no visibility into them.

WhatsApp, phone and email

Our call and message buttons hand you to your own app. Nothing is tracked on our side when you tap them, and we only know you contacted us when your message actually arrives. What happens to that message afterwards is covered in our privacy policy.

If this changes

If we ever add a cookie beyond what is listed here, or switch on an advertising feature we have deliberately left off, we will say so here first and update the date at the top. Questions to nrivaluers@gmail.com.