Cookie Policy

Cookies we set

Two, and only if you are outside the UK, the EEA and Switzerland. Both belong to Google Analytics and both are used to count visitors. There are no accounts, so there is no session cookie, and no advertising runs here, so there is no advertising cookie — those are the ones worth caring about and neither exists.

If you are reading this in the UK, the EEA or Switzerland, neither of those is set for you. The analytics tag is told to store nothing before it makes its first request, so there is no cookie to accept, refuse or clear — which is also why you have not been shown a banner.

Browser storage we use

We use a small amount of localStorage, which is similar to a cookie but is never transmitted to a server:

This is a preference you set deliberately using the theme toggle. It holds the word light or dark and nothing else, contains no identifier, and cannot be used to recognise you.

Why there is no consent banner

Because nobody here is shown a cookie they have not already been told about in a way the law requires asking about first. The rules that mandate a banner — UK PECR regulation 6, and the EU ePrivacy Directive — require consent before anything non-essential is stored on your device, and they follow the reader rather than the website. So the site does the obvious thing: where that duty applies, it stores nothing.

A consent dialogue shown to somebody the rule does not cover is theatre, and it teaches people to dismiss consent dialogues without reading them, which makes the ones that matter less effective. A consent dialogue that hides a real choice behind a friendly button is worse. Not needing one is better than either.

The line is storage, not measurement. What the rules require consent for is putting something on your device or reading it back, not counting a page view as such — which is why a reader in Manchester and a reader in Memphis are treated differently by the same tag. Advertising is a different matter again, and a genuine consent mechanism appears in the same release as the first ad request — not before, and not afterwards.

How the site decides which you are: it reads the time zone your own browser reports, and treats anything European as needing consent. That is deliberately blunt. It over-includes — Moscow, Istanbul and Belgrade are all outside the EEA and all get the no-storage treatment — because the two possible mistakes are not comparable. Counting one visitor fewer costs us a row in a report. Setting a cookie on somebody entitled to be asked first costs them a choice they were owed. If your browser will not report a time zone at all, you get the cautious answer too.

What changes with advertising

Advertising typically involves cookies and identifiers set by the ad provider rather than by us. Before any of it is enabled:

• This page will list each cookie with its provider, purpose and lifetime.
• A consent management platform will be in place where the law requires one, with non-essential storage off by default until you choose otherwise, and a way to withdraw consent as easily as you gave it.
• The privacy policy will be updated in the same release.

Until a consent platform is integrated, the site makes no advertising request at all. That is deliberate: the failure direction is that we lose revenue, not that you lose a choice.

Controlling storage

Every browser lets you clear or block site storage, and doing so here removes your saved theme preference and nothing else. No practice results are stored, because they never leave the page you took them on — see the privacy policy.

If you block storage entirely, the theme toggle still works for the current page; it simply will not remember your choice next time.

What this means in practice for you

You can use this entire site — every practice test, every explanation, every guide — without being tracked, without an account, and without making a single consent decision. Nothing here is gated behind accepting anything.

Browsing in a private window works identically, except that the theme resets each time. Blocking storage entirely works too, with the same single consequence. There is no degraded experience to discover, because nothing about the product depends on remembering you.

Why we treat this as a design constraint

Setting nothing was not an accident of an early launch. Practice attempts are scored in the browser rather than on a server precisely so there is no session to track, and the site works entirely without accounts so there is no identifier to store. Those choices cost us features — you cannot currently save your progress — and the benefit is that this document is short and verifiable.

You can check it, and the check is the point of writing it this way. Open your browser’s developer tools and look at the storage panel for this site. You will find the theme preference, your saved practice attempts, and — outside the UK, the EEA and Switzerland — the two Google Analytics cookies named in the table above. Nothing else. No advertising script to inspect either, because none exists.

What counts as strictly necessary here

The theme preference is arguably not even that — the site works perfectly without it, it simply forgets whether you wanted the dark palette. We keep it because a study site that flashes white at somebody working late is a worse experience, and because the alternative is asking for consent to remember a colour, which is not a meaningful choice to put in front of anybody.

If we are ever wrong about that, the fix is trivial: the toggle continues to work for the current session without storing anything at all.

How to verify any cookie policy, including this one

A cookie policy is one of the few legal documents on a website you can check yourself in under a minute, and very few readers ever do.

Open your browser’s developer tools and look at the application or storage panel. It lists every cookie and every storage key the site has set, with values. Compare that against what the policy declares. A site setting a dozen advertising and analytics cookies while its policy mentions two is telling you something useful about how carefully it treats everything else.

Also check the network panel for requests to domains that are not the site you are on. Those are the third parties, and each one is a party the policy should name.

We would rather you checked than took our word for it, which is the main reason this document is written to be falsifiable rather than comprehensive.

Third-party content

We embed almost no third-party content. The measurement services are the exception — Vercel Analytics and Google Analytics 4, described in the privacy policy. No fonts loaded from another domain, no video players, no social widgets, no comment system. Fonts are served from this origin, which is why there is no font-provider cookie to declare. That also means no third party can set storage through this site without us adding them deliberately and updating this page.

The measurement requests are the ones you will actually see there, so they are worth explaining rather than merely listing. Each one carries a note that a page on this site was opened, the address of that page, the address that referred you if there was one, and the sort of thing any web request carries anyway — your browser, your operating system and the rough part of the world you are in. None of them carries your answers, your score or anything you typed, because none of that exists outside the tab you are sitting in.

None of them is allowed to remember you between visits either. They are configured to store nothing on your device at all, which is unusual for measurement tools and is the reason this page can still say it sets no cookies. That costs us something real: with nothing stored, a counter cannot tell somebody returning for a third study session from three different people, so the visitor numbers we see are estimates rather than counts. We would rather have an approximate figure than an accurate one bought with a tracker.

If you would rather not appear in them at all, block them. Any content blocker will, as will the tracking protection built into most browsers, and no part of this site changes when they are blocked — no test fails to load, no result fails to score, and nothing prompts you to turn anything back on.

Related

Privacy policy · Advertising policy · Security and data