Cookie and Tracking Policy
Every cookie and browser storage key this site uses, itemized by name, purpose and duration. Nothing non-essential is stored until you allow it.
- Effective
- August 4, 2026
- Last updated
- August 4, 2026
How consent works here
This site puts things in three buckets. Only the first is on no matter what.
- Essential
- One cookie that remembers your privacy choice. Without it we would have to ask you again on every page.
- Analytics
- Google Analytics 4, which tells us which pages get read. Off until you allow it.
- Visitor insights
- Our own measurement of a single visit, summarized to our internal Slack and Discord so a person can follow up. Off until you allow it.
When we detect an EU, UK or Swiss visit, nothing outside the essential bucket runs until you choose. We work that out from your browser's timezone and language, never from your IP address, which avoids a location lookup but is approximate: a VPN or travel can put you in the wrong mode. Everywhere else, analytics and visitor insights start on and you can switch them off at any time using the button below or the "Your Privacy Choices" link in the footer.
If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal, we treat it as an opt-out and switch both optional categories off automatically. We do not ask you to confirm. For the visitor insights pipeline we also enforce it on our server, so a stale cached page cannot send us anything about you even if its own check were bypassed.
Local and session storage
Some measurement uses browser storage rather than cookies. It behaves the same way for consent purposes, so we list it the same way.
| Key | Type | Category | Purpose | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| simple_engineers_session | Session storage | Visitor insights | A random per-visit identifier, so one visit produces one internal alert rather than one per page | Until you close the tab |
| simple_engineers_visited | Session storage | Visitor insights | A flag preventing duplicate alerts within the same visit | Until you close the tab |
| se_visit_count | Local storage | Visitor insights | How many times you have visited, so we can tell a returning reader from a new one | Until consent is withdrawn or you clear browser storage |
| se_last_visit | Local storage | Visitor insights | The date of your previous visit | Until consent is withdrawn or you clear browser storage |
| intent_profile_* | Local storage | Visitor insights | A per-visit engagement score and a list of the pages you viewed during that visit | Until consent is withdrawn or you clear browser storage |
Withdrawing consent deletes all five of these immediately, rather than merely stopping new writes.
What visitor insights measures beyond storage
Not everything we measure is stored in your browser. With visitor insights enabled, a summary of the following is sent to our internal Slack and Discord for a single visit:
- The page you landed on and the site that referred you
- Device type, operating system, browser and version
- Your screen size
- Your timezone and browser language, which give us a rough region
- Campaign parameters in the URL, such as utm_source, and whether you arrived from an AI assistant like ChatGPT or Perplexity
- How far down the page you scrolled and how long you stayed
- An engagement score derived from the above
Your IP address is not part of this. An earlier version of this site sent visitor IP addresses to a third-party geolocation service to look up city and internet provider. That was removed in August 2026. The timezone and language above come from your browser and never leave as an identifier on their own.
Fonts, embeds and third-party requests
Web fonts are downloaded at build time and served from our own domain, so loading a page makes no request to Google Fonts. There are no embedded videos, no scheduling widgets, no chat widgets and no iframes on this site, which means no third party is silently observing your visit.
With analytics enabled, the one outbound third-party request is to Google Analytics. With analytics disabled, there is none.
Controlling this in your browser
Our preferences dialog is the most direct route, but you can also work at the browser level:
- Turn on Global Privacy Control. Firefox and Brave support it natively in privacy settings, and extensions add it to Chrome and Edge. We honor it automatically, so this is a single switch that covers this site and many others.
- Block or delete cookies in your browser settings. Blocking all cookies will also prevent us from remembering your privacy choice, so we will ask again on each visit.
- Clear site data to remove the storage keys listed above. In most browsers this is under Settings, then Privacy, then site or cookie data.
- Google Analytics opt-out. Google publishes a browser add-on that blocks Analytics on every site you visit.
Changes
If we add or remove a cookie or a storage key, we update the tables above in the same change and update the date at the top. If a new item needs consent, existing consent will not silently cover it and we will ask again.
See also our Privacy Policy and Your privacy choices and rights. Questions: privacy@simpleengineers.com.