Cookie sheet Revision 1 Counted 16 October 2026
Cookies
Block every one of them and the totals here read exactly as before, since no part of the arithmetic leans on a stored file. What follows is what the files are for, what refusing each one costs, and the durations and supplier names this sheet will not print.
1
What the word takes in
Call it a small file, carrying a name, which a site hands a browser and asks for back on the next visit. Other sorts of browser storage do much the same work under other names, a reader reaches all of them from the same settings, and this sheet treats them together rather than pretending the distinction matters to anybody outside a developer’s office.
Telling the purposes apart does matter, though, because what a reader gives up by refusing one is not what they give up by refusing another.
2
What each file is doing
Four jobs cover anything a site like this one needs stored. Here is each job with the cost of refusing it.
| What the file is there for | What saying no costs a reader |
|---|---|
| Holding a session together, and carrying security tokens | Pages may behave oddly, which is the one refusal with a real cost |
| Remembering the answer given to the consent notice | The notice comes back on every visit, so refusing makes the site more tiresome rather than more private |
| Remembering a setting a reader chose | The setting has to be chosen again |
| Counting pages opened, and recording that a visit arrived from here so a commission can be matched later | Nothing whatever, to the reader |
That fourth job is the one paying for the research, so it is worth saying plainly what it does and does not involve. It records that a visit came from this site, which is how a payment is matched to an introduction afterwards. It does not change a figure, a total or an order, and how this site is paid states the whole arrangement.
3
Three controls that need nobody’s permission
Three routes are open to a reader and none of them asks this site to agree.
- The browser’s own settings, which can refuse files from a site outright or clear what is already there.
- A private window, which throws away what it collected when it closes.
- The answer given to a consent notice, which can be revisited later.
None of the three costs a reader a figure. The sums here are computed from inputs printed beside them, so a sheet read with every file blocked gives the same total as a sheet read with all of them allowed, down to the penny. A page that needs tracking in order to count is not counting.
There is also one list no published page can match for accuracy, and it is sitting on the reader’s own machine already. A browser will show what has been stored against this site, names and expiry dates included, and that display is current on the day it is opened in a way no published list can be.
4
What clearing them does not touch
Worth stating, because the assumption runs the other way and the assumption is wrong. The protections that matter do not live in a browser file, so browser housekeeping has no effect on any of them.
A self-exclusion registration is held by the scheme and enforced by operators against their own customer records, so clearing files changes nothing about it and neither does a new device. Blocking software sits on the device itself. A bank’s gambling block sits with the bank. None of the three is a setting a reader can mislay, which is the point of them, and each is described with its own limits at staying in control.
5
Files that are not this site’s
A fifth kind exists over which this sheet has no authority whatever. An operator reached from here sets what it chooses to set, governed by its own notice, and a refusal given on these pages has no bearing on any of it.
The point of handover, and the extra weight it carries where a cashier sits offshore, is laid out on the privacy sheet. Put shortly: offers reached from these pages hold no Great Britain licence, and the record-keeping and identity duties a British licence carries are therefore owed by nobody over there.
6
No names, no durations, no count
Three things a thorough-looking cookie page would carry are absent here. No supplier is named. No expiry period is printed in days or months. No total number of files is given.
The reason is the one running through the whole site. A duration typed into a paragraph is a guess the moment anything changes, any list of suppliers rots quicker than a page gets rewritten, and a reader trusting either has been misled by the very detail that made the page look careful. The browser’s own display in part 3 answers all three questions accurately, which no paragraph can.
Where a detail of that sort is genuinely needed, it comes on request, and the route for asking is on write to us. The same habit governs the figures. With no source to be had, the gap itself goes on the page, as who counts this explains at greater length.