Cookie Policy

What gets stored on your device when you read us, who put it there, and how to stop it. Last updated: August 2026.

What a cookie is, and the things that are not cookies but act like them

A cookie is a small text file a site asks your browser to keep, so the next request carries a little context: that you have been here, that you chose Spanish, that you already answered the consent question. It cannot read your files or watch another tab. On its own it is closer to a cloakroom ticket than to surveillance.

Cookies are only part of it, and a page that talks about nothing else is hiding the rest. Local storage keeps preferences in the browser without sending them back with every request. A tracking pixel is a one-pixel image whose only job is to be requested, which tells the server a page or an email was opened. Ad partners use device and browser identifiers that behave like cookies and last as long. This page covers all of it, whatever the technical name.

The four categories we use

The consent manager sorts everything into four buckets, and only the first runs before you have answered.

Strictly necessary items keep the site working and cannot be switched off: they hold your consent choice, protect forms from abuse, and let the content delivery network serve the right version of a page. Preference items remember a setting, most usefully whether you read us in English or Spanish, which matters here more than elsewhere because the glossary side of the site is Spanish and always has been. Analytics items count visits, record which pages were read and for how long, and show which explanations people abandon halfway. Advertising items carry the identifiers deciding which ads are eligible for the slot beside the copy, measure whether they were seen, and cap how often you get the same one.

Turning analytics off costs you nothing and costs us the data we use to commission the next day’s work, which is a trade we accept because we asked for the answer.

Who else sets one, and why we will not print a vendor table

Three kinds of company besides us. Our analytics provider, which handles page-level data on our instructions and nothing else. The email service that sends the newsletter, whose pixel records opens and clicks in sends you subscribed to. And the programmatic exchanges filling part of our display inventory, with the demand partners behind them.

That last group is worth being straight about. In a live auction one bid request can reach a long list of companies inside a few hundred milliseconds, and the list differs by country and by month. A hand-typed table of vendor names here would be out of date by the time you read it, and a wrong table is worse than none. So the current list sits inside the consent manager, named company by company with the purposes each one claims and a link to its own policy. The standards we hold those partners to, and the ad categories we refuse outright, are on the advertising page.

Personalised and non-personalised advertising

Say yes to the advertising category and the ads you see can be chosen using the identifiers above, which is what personalised advertising means in practice: a profile built across sites and used to decide what is worth showing you. Say no and the site still carries advertising, selected from the page you are on and rough location rather than from anything about you. Nothing is withheld either way.

Non-personalised advertising pays us less. We are telling you that because the honest reason a publisher pushes hard on this banner is money rather than your experience, and pretending otherwise would sit badly next to the rest of this site.

Changing your answer, and doing it at the browser instead

The consent manager appears on your first visit and reopens whenever you want from the link in the site footer. Accept all, refuse everything that is not strictly necessary, or switch a single category on or off, and reverse any of it later. Withdrawing consent is exactly as easy as giving it, which is the point of the law and also just fair.

Your browser will do the work too, and it does not need our permission. Every current browser can block third-party cookies, clear what is already stored, and open a private window that discards everything on close. If your browser sends the Global Privacy Control signal we treat it as an opt-out of sharing for advertising and act on it without being asked again. Blocking the strictly necessary items breaks small things, such as remembering that you already answered the banner.

For advertising there are industry opt-out tools covering many partners at once: YourAdChoices, run by the Digital Advertising Alliance, Your Online Choices from its European counterpart, and the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out. Google’s own ad settings control personalisation on services it operates. None is a complete switch, and any is better than nothing.

How long things last, and where this sits

Session items disappear when you close the browser. The record of your consent choice lasts twelve months, after which we ask again rather than assuming a year-old answer still stands. Preference items such as the language toggle last twelve months. Analytics identifiers last up to fourteen months. Advertising identifiers run from a few days to thirteen months where that ceiling applies, and up to twenty-four elsewhere, set by the partner rather than by us.