A cookie is a scrap of text a site leaves on your device so it can recognise it next time. For anyone reading this site there are three in total, and two of the three only arrive if you say yes.
Before you answer, nothing
When you arrive, nothing has been written yet. No cookie, no request to Google or to anyone else. The question at the bottom of the screen is not a formality to be cleared away: until you close it by answering, nothing really happens.
And if you answer no, nothing happens either — the site works exactly the same. There is no worse version for people who refuse.
The cookie that remembers your answer
One only, and it is mine. It is there so the same question is not put to you on every page: it is a technical cookie, and technical cookies need no consent.
| Name | Set by | Lasts | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
vc-consenso | This site | Six months | Remembers whether you said yes or no to statistics. It holds that word and nothing else. |
The statistics cookies, if you said yes
Right now the statistics are switched off. What follows describes what happens when I turn them on — and the day I do, you get asked first. While this line is here, nothing is written to your device and Google does not know you came by.
Only after your yes does the page load Google Analytics 4, which writes these two. They are Google’s, not mine.
| Name | Set by | Lasts | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
_ga | Two years | Tells one device from another, so the same visit is not counted twice. | |
_ga_<identifier> | Two years | Holds the pages of a single session together. |
If you change your mind and say no, the site tries to delete them. Whatever survives — because Google wrote it and not everything can be removed from here — you can clear from your browser settings, and Analytics will not start again in any case.
What Google sees, and what it does not
It sees the pages you open, how long you stay, where you came from, the kind of device and the country. It does not keep your IP address, there is no advertising attached, and the signals that would personalise it are switched off. The data stays in Analytics for no longer than fourteen months and then goes.
The rest — who processes what, on which legal basis, where the data ends up — is in the privacy notice.
How to change your mind
At the bottom of every page there is “Cookie preferences”: click it and the question comes back, with the same two answers as before. It works both for accepting after a refusal and the other way round.
After six months the question comes back on its own: an old choice does not hold forever.
You can also delete every cookie from your browser settings, or tell the browser not to accept any: the site keeps working, and the only thing you lose is its memory of your answer.
The admin side
When I log into the site’s admin, WordPress writes its session cookies, which keep me signed in. They have nothing to do with reading the site: without keys you never see one of them.
Last updated: August 2026.