Last updated: 21 July 2026
What Are Cookies?
Cookies are small text files stored on your device by your browser when you visit websites. They help sites work correctly, stay secure, and — where you allow it — help the owner understand how the site is used and fund the site through advertising.
The cookies we use
We group cookies into three categories:
Strictly necessary (always on). These are required for the site to function and stay secure, including cookies set by Cloudflare to identify trusted traffic and protect against malicious activity. Because they are essential, they do not require consent.
Analytics (only with your consent). If you accept, Google Analytics sets cookies to measure aggregate, anonymised usage, with IP anonymisation enabled. These are never set until you opt in, and no analytics data is sent before then.
Advertising (personalisation only with your consent). This site carries ads served by Google AdSense, which is how it stays free to read. If you consent to personalised advertising, Google may use cookies and similar technologies to build an advertising profile and tailor the ads you see, and to measure their performance.
If you decline, you will still see ads, but they are non-personalised: chosen from the page’s context rather than from a profile of you. Google may still use a limited amount of information — such as approximate location derived from your IP address and your device type — to serve and frequency-cap those ads and to guard against fraud. Google’s own description of this data is in its Advertising Privacy & Terms .
Embedded content. Pages that embed third-party media (for example YouTube) may cause that provider to set its own cookies when the content loads. These are governed by the provider’s own policies.
Your choice and how to change it
Which consent tool you see depends on where you are:
- In the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland, consent is collected by Google’s certified Privacy & Messaging consent tool, which records your choices for advertising purposes and passes them to Google’s ad systems.
- Elsewhere, a banner on your first visit offers Reject all, Configure, and Accept all. Rejecting is a single click, exactly like accepting. Configure lets you switch analytics and personalised advertising on or off individually and save that combination. Your choice is stored in your browser’s local storage, not in a cookie.
You can change or withdraw your choice at any time — reopen the cookie preferences. You can also opt out of personalised advertising across all participating sites via Google’s Ads Settings , clear cookies and site data from your browser settings, or browse in private/incognito mode. Tools such as uBlock Origin can block tracking scripts entirely. Note that Cloudflare may still process IP addresses for security; using a VPN can help protect your privacy.
More Information
For general information about cookies and how to manage them, see www.allaboutcookies.org . For how we handle data more broadly, see our Privacy Policy .
If you have any questions about our use of cookies, contact vi [at] hackberry [dot] xyz.