Cookie policy

Cookies

A cookie is a tiny file a website asks your browser to keep and which the browser hands back on every visit. It exists to remember things between pages: anything from your language to which ads you have already been shown. It is not a program and it cannot read anything on your machine, but it does allow the same browser to be recognised over time, which is why you are owed an account of the ones used here.

Alongside cookies there is local storage, which works similarly but never travels to the server. This site leans on it far more than on cookies, so it appears below as well.

What this site sets

Very little, and nothing for advertising or statistics. A single cookie:

• "NEXT_LOCALE", which remembers the language you are reading in so that coming back does not drop you into another one. It is strictly functional, set by the site itself, and lasts a year.

Every other preference lives in your browser's local storage and is never sent with a request:

• "finan:cash-flow" and "finan:compound-interest", holding the figures you typed into each calculator so they survive closing the tab.
• "theme", holding your choice of light or dark mode.

None of it identifies a person, and all of it disappears if you clear the site's data from your browser. The price of clearing it is that the calculator starts from scratch again.

Advertising cookies

This site shows Google AdSense ads, and it is Google that places the advertising cookies. The usual ones are these:

• "__gads" and "__gpi", on this site's own domain, which Google uses to count how often an ad has been shown and to cap repetition. They last up to thirteen months.
• "IDE" and "test_cookie", on the doubleclick.net domain, used to measure ad effectiveness and to check whether your browser accepts cookies at all. The first lasts up to two years; the second, a few minutes.
• The DART cookie, which enables Google to serve you ads based on your previous visits to this site and other sites on the internet.

Google can revise this list without telling us, so the authoritative reference is always theirs. The full detail is on Google's partner sites page.

Your consent

If you are browsing from the European Economic Area, Switzerland or the United Kingdom, the first thing you see is a consent message managed by Google, a certified platform under the industry's transparency framework. That is where you decide whether to accept advertising cookies and whether ads may be personalised.

Refusing shuts nothing down and takes nothing away: the calculators work exactly the same, because they depend on no cookie at all. All that changes is that ads stop being picked on the basis of your activity.

You can change your mind whenever you like. The message itself leaves a permanent way back in to review your choice, and clearing the site's cookies makes it appear again from scratch.

Managing them in your browser

Independently of all the above, your browser lets you block or delete cookies for any site. It sits in the privacy settings, under much the same name everywhere:

• In Chrome, under Settings › Privacy and security › Third-party cookies.
• In Firefox, under Settings › Privacy & Security › Cookies and Site Data.
• In Safari, under Settings › Privacy, and in the History menu to clear what is stored.
• In Edge, under Settings › Cookies and site permissions.

Blocking all third-party cookies is perfectly compatible with using this site.

Opting out of personalised advertising

Beyond the consent message, there are controls that apply across every site at once:

• Google ad settings, to switch personalisation off everywhere Google serves ads.
• aboutads.info, the industry-wide opt-out in the United States.
• Your Online Choices, its European counterpart.

What data each of these parties handles is set out in the privacy policy.

Changes

This list is revised whenever what the site loads changes. The date at the top records the last revision.