Cookies

What changed, and when

Until Google accepted this site into AdSense, this page said there were no cookies at all and no consent banner, because both were true. Advertising changed that. The page was rewritten in the same release as the tag rather than afterwards, because a cookie policy that lags the code is worse than none.

What this site stores on your device

Nothing of its own. No local storage, no session storage, no IndexedDB, no fingerprinting, and no cookie written by any code on this site. Nothing here tracks you between visits, and the two checks hold what you type in memory only — closing the tab is enough to be rid of it.

You will still find cookies on this domain, and pretending otherwise would be the easy kind of dishonesty. They are set by Google rather than by this site, and there are two ways they get here.

Cookies from the other products

Every product sits on a subdomain of itisyou.app, and a cookie set on the parent domain is visible across all of them. Kits uses Google Analytics, which by default scopes its _ga cookies to .itisyou.app rather than to kits.itisyou.app alone.

So if you have used Kits and accepted analytics there, you will find _ga and _ga_H5NCBZBLPQ on this site as well. They were set by Kits, with your consent, and this site neither writes nor reads them — but they are genuinely present here, and a page telling you to check your own browser has to say so.

Arrive here without having used Kits and they are not there at all.

What Google AdSense stores

Advertising is served by Google, and Google sets cookies and reads device signals to select and measure advertisements, and to detect invalid traffic. That data goes to Google, not to me; I receive aggregate reporting, and never a record of who you are or what you read.

• Advertising — set by Google when advertising loads, used to choose ads, cap how often you see one, and detect fraud. Governed by Google’s policy for partner sites.
• Your consent choice — FCCDCF, set by Google’s consent framework to record whether you have been asked and what you answered. Strictly necessary to honour the answer you gave, so it is set either way, and it is the one cookie a first-time visitor here will find.

Your choice, and how to change it

If you are in the UK or the EEA you are asked before advertising cookies are set, through Google’s own consent message. Refusing is a real option: the site works identically, and you may still see advertising, but non-personalised.

To change your answer later, use the privacy or consent link Google’s message provides, or clear this site’s cookies in your browser and you will be asked again. You can also turn off personalised advertising for your Google account entirely at My Ad Center, which applies everywhere and not just here.

The rules advertising has to follow on this site — labelled, never first, no pop-unders or interstitials — are on the advertising disclosure.

The products may differ

Products with accounts need session storage, and Space asks before enabling its analytics — which is a real prompt for a real thing, and stays declined until you say otherwise. Each product documents its own storage. This page is only about itisyou.app.

Checking for yourself

Open your browser’s developer tools, look at the Application or Storage panel, and browse this site. What you should find, and nothing else:

• FCCDCF — your consent state, on a first visit and every visit after.
• Google advertising cookies, once you have agreed to them.
• _ga and _ga_H5NCBZBLPQ, but only if you have used Kits and accepted analytics there.

Anything else — in particular a cookie named by this site, or an entry in local storage — is a bug and a broken promise at the same time. Please tell me.