2. Our approach
We run this publication on the smallest cookie footprint we can manage. There is no advertising network on this site, no retargeting pixel, no social widget phoning home from an article page, and no data brokerage of any kind. Declining every optional category leaves the site fully readable — no nag screens, no truncated articles, no degraded typography.
3. Categories in use
3.1 Strictly necessary
These support page delivery, security and the recording of your own cookie choices. Without them the site cannot function correctly, so they are set without consent, as the law permits. They are first-party, contain no advertising identifier, and typically expire when your session ends or within twelve months for the preference record itself.
3.2 Preferences
If you set a reading preference — text size, or a stored dismissal of a notice — that choice is kept in local storage on your device so the site does not ask again. This data stays on your device and is not transmitted to us as a profile.
3.3 Measurement
Aggregate measurement tells us how many people read an article and how far down the page they got. We use it editorially: to decide whether a fourteen-minute read on refining chemistry earns its length, and which sections deserve more commissioning budget. It is configured for aggregate reporting, without cross-site tracking or advertising profiles, and where the tooling permits, IP addresses are truncated before storage.
3.4 Embedded third-party media
Occasionally an article embeds material hosted elsewhere — a document viewer, a chart, an archival clip. Loading such an embed can allow the third party to set its own cookies under its own policy. Where we can, we load embeds only after an explicit click, so that nothing is set unless you choose to view the content.
5. Lifespans and what each item actually stores
The table below is written out in prose because a cookie inventory that only a developer can read is not a disclosure. Every item listed is first-party unless the row says otherwise.
- Session identifier — strictly necessary, no personal data, cleared when you close the browser tab. It exists so that a page request and its assets are recognised as belonging to one visit.
- Consent record — strictly necessary, stores only your own choices about optional categories, expires after twelve months, at which point we ask again rather than assume the answer still holds.
- Security token — strictly necessary, short-lived, used to protect form submissions such as a correction request from cross-site forgery.
- Reading preferences — optional, held in local storage on your device, no expiry other than your own clearing of site data, never transmitted to us as a profile.
- Aggregate measurement identifier — optional, rotates rather than persisting indefinitely, truncated at the network level where the tooling allows, never joined to a name, email address or advertising identity.
- Third-party embed cookies — optional and third-party, set only if you click to load an embedded document, chart or clip, and governed by that provider's own policy rather than ours.
6. Legal basis for each category
Strictly necessary storage is placed under the exemption for communication and for services you have explicitly requested. Everything else is placed only on the basis of your consent, freely given, specific, informed and as easy to withdraw as it was to grant.
We do not treat continued scrolling as consent. We do not pre-tick boxes. We do not make refusal cost you the article, and we do not present a 'reject' option that is deliberately harder to find than 'accept'. Where a reader in a jurisdiction with an opt-out regime rather than an opt-in one refuses sale or sharing of personal information, we honour that refusal globally rather than only where it is legally compelled.
7. Withdrawing consent later
A choice made once is not permanent. You can withdraw consent at any time by clearing site data for this domain in your browser, which deletes the consent record along with everything else and returns the site to its default state of asking. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out before you withdrew, but it stops all optional storage from that moment.
If you use several devices or browsers, the choice is stored per device. That is a limitation of the technology, not an attempt to wear you down: a preference held on your device is precisely the kind of thing we cannot centralise without building the reader profile we have chosen not to build.
8. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control
We honour the Global Privacy Control signal where your browser or extension sends one, treating it as a refusal of optional measurement. The older Do Not Track header is unstandardised and largely ignored across the web, but where we can detect it we treat it the same way.
10. Changes and how to query them
If we add a new category of storage, this inventory is updated before that storage is deployed, and the revision date at the head of the page changes accordingly. Material changes to optional categories reset consent rather than inheriting it.
If you inspect this site's storage and find something not described here, we want to know. Send the cookie or key name and the page it appeared on to the editorial desk; if the disclosure is wrong we will correct this page under the same corrections policy that governs our journalism.
11. Local storage, session storage and cache
Cookies are not the only mechanism a browser offers for keeping state. This site may use localStorage or sessionStorage for the same narrow purposes described above — remembering a display preference, or holding a value for the duration of a single visit. These are treated exactly as cookies are for the purposes of consent: nothing non-essential is stored without a lawful basis.
Separately, your browser and any intermediate content delivery network will cache images, stylesheets and scripts so that pages load quickly on a return visit. Cache entries are not personal data and cannot be read by us; clearing your browser cache removes them.
12. What we do not use
It is often more informative to state what is absent. This site does not use any of the following, and adopting any of them would require an update to this notice and, where applicable, fresh consent.
- Advertising or retargeting pixels of any kind, including social platform conversion pixels.
- Cross-site identity graphs, hashed-email identifiers or probabilistic device fingerprinting.
- Session replay or heat-mapping tools that record mouse movement, scrolling or keystrokes.
- Data broker enrichment of any visitor record.
- Third-party tag managers capable of injecting further scripts after page load.
13. Auditing this notice for yourself
You do not have to take our word for any of this. Open your browser's developer tools, select the Application or Storage tab, and inspect the cookies and storage entries created by this domain. The Network tab will show every third-party request the page makes.
If you find something on this site that is not described in this notice, that is a defect and we want to know about it. Write to the editorial desk with the page URL and what you observed, and we will either remove the component or amend this document — and say which we did.
Contact the desk
Questions about this document, a correction request, a licensing enquiry or a data rights request all reach the same place: the editorial desk at TheGoldMagazine. Quote the page URL and, where relevant, the article and passage concerned.