Cookie Policy

This site sets no cookies

Not a first-party cookie, not a third-party cookie, not an analytics cookie. Open the storage panel of your browser’s developer tools on any page here and the cookie list for cognate.press is empty.

The processing that delivering a page does involve — the request data Cloudflare receives in order to return the page — is described in the Privacy Policy, which also names the controller responsible for it.

Nothing is stored on your device at all

Cookies are the usual subject of a page like this, so it is worth being exact about the wider claim: this site writes nothing to your browser by any mechanism. No localStorage, no sessionStorage, no IndexedDB, no cache the site manages itself. A visitor arrives, receives HTML, CSS and two font files, and leaves nothing behind.

If you have read the cookie policy of one of the imprint’s publications you will have seen a paragraph about a theme preference held in localStorage. That paragraph has no equivalent here, and its absence is the point: this site has no theme control, so there is no preference to remember and no key to write.

Why there is no consent banner

Art. 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive, as implemented across the EU, requires consent before a site stores information on your device or gains access to information already stored there. It exempts storage or access that is strictly necessary to provide a service you explicitly requested.

This site does neither of the two things the article governs. It does not store, and it does not read. The strictly-necessary exemption is therefore not even reached — there is no storage to be exempt. A banner asking permission for something that does not happen would be theatre, and it would train you to click through the ones that matter.

The network layer, which is not ours

One thing outside this site’s control deserves saying plainly.

Cloudflare delivers this site. If Cloudflare’s bot-protection layer is active on the domain, its infrastructure can set a cookie named __cf_bm — a short-lived, strictly-necessary security cookie used to tell automated traffic from human traffic. It carries no advertising or profiling function and is exempt from consent as strictly necessary.

That cookie belongs to the network layer rather than to anything this site’s code does. It is named here because a reader inspecting their browser’s storage should find that this page explains everything they see, not most of it. If you find any other cookie set on this domain, tell us at contact@cognate.press — that is a bug in this page, and it will be fixed on this page.

Third-party requests

None of the following exist on this site, in any form:

• Analytics cookies, first-party tracking identifiers, or any page-view beacon.
• Advertising, ad networks, retargeting, or conversion pixels.
• Social widgets, share buttons, embedded video players, or comment systems.
• Fonts, scripts, or stylesheets loaded from anyone else’s domain.
• Session cookies, login state, or anything that distinguishes one reader from another.

The two typefaces the site is set in are bundled into its own build from npm packages, so loading a page makes no request to a font host. The only outbound links are the ones you can see in the text, and following one is your decision, not the page’s.

The publications differ, and answer for themselves

The imprint’s seven publications are separate sites with separate operators, separate builds and separate policies. Several of them do store a theme preference, and some enable a cookieless audience measurement product. What any of them does is described in that site’s own cookie policy, on that site’s own domain — this page has no authority over them and does not speak for them.

If this ever changes

The position on this page holds only while the site stays as it is. Adding anything that stores data on your device, or that loads a resource on a third party’s behalf — a comment system, an embedded player, an ad network, an analytics product that is not cookieless — would put that storage outside the strictly-necessary exemption and require a consent mechanism that runs before the resource loads.

The rule the site works to is that this page is updated in the same change that adds such a resource, or the resource does not ship. This page therefore describes the site you are on now, not an intention about it.