Cookie Policy

What a cookie is

A cookie is a small text file that a site asks your browser to keep, so that the next request your browser makes carries something the site can recognise. Most of the cookies used on MIND CRON hold nothing more than a random string. On their own they say almost nothing about you. Joined to enough other records by companies whose business is joining records, they can say more, which is why the law asks us to get your consent for some of them.

This page explains which cookies are used here, who sets them, what they do, how long they last and how to refuse them. What happens to the data once it is collected, and the rights you hold over it, are in our privacy policy.

Cookies and their relatives

Two other technologies do similar work and are treated the same way here. Local storage keeps values inside the browser without attaching them to every request; we use it to remember your consent answer and a light or dark preference where the site offers one. Pixels, sometimes called tags or beacons, are tiny invisible files whose only purpose is to be requested, which tells a server that a page or an advertisement actually loaded.

When this page says cookie, read it as covering all three. Your consent choice at the banner applies to every one of them in the category you refused.

The categories we use

Everything set on this site falls into one of four categories, and only the first runs without asking you. We have kept the count at four on purpose. A category list long enough to look thorough is usually one nobody has audited.

• Strictly necessary. Load balancing, security and abuse protection, and remembering that you have already answered the banner. The site cannot be served without these.
• Preferences. Display choices and notices you have dismissed. Losing them breaks nothing except your patience.
• Analytics. Counting readers and pages, seeing whether anyone reaches the end of a long report, and telling a genuine surge on a breaking story from an automated script.
• Advertising. Set by the advertising network that fills our banner units and by the demand partners bidding through it. They cap how often you see the same advertisement, measure viewability, detect fraud and, where you have agreed, select advertisements from a profile built elsewhere.

Who sets them here

We set very few cookies ourselves. Most come from third parties, and we describe them by category because the companies behind each category change over time: the delivery network that gets pages to readers on slow connections, our analytics provider, the advertising network and its partners, and occasionally an embedded video, map or social post inside a story, which brings that platform’s cookies with it.

We do not print a vendor list in prose, because ours changes and a stale list published confidently is worse than none. The consent manager holds the current list, with each company named alongside what it says it does and the legal basis it claims. If a name in there worries you, refuse that vendor and read the site anyway.

Advertising cookies, and what changes if you refuse

With your consent, the advertising network may use an identifier to choose advertisements based on what has been inferred about you across other sites and apps. Refuse, and the banner units still fill, but with contextual advertising instead: creative chosen by the subject of the page and roughly where in the world the request came from, with no profile involved. A travel story gets travel advertising because of the story, not because of you.

Refusing costs you nothing here. No article is withheld, no counter starts running, and the banner does not come back three paragraphs later wearing a different label. It does cost us money, because non-personalised inventory pays less, and we would rather say that plainly than hide the trade behind a pre-ticked box. Display advertising is the only revenue the site has, as our ownership and funding page explains.

Changing your answer

Consent is not a door that locks behind you. The consent manager reopens from the footer of every page, shows what you chose last time, and lets you switch any category or any single vendor on or off. A withdrawal takes effect on the next page you load. Readers covered by the CCPA and CPRA or similar state laws will find the Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information control in the same place, and we honour the Global Privacy Control signal sent by your browser.

Browser controls

Your browser’s own settings sit underneath all of this and outrank us. Every current browser can block third-party cookies, clear what is stored for a single site, or refuse cookies entirely, usually under a privacy or site-settings menu. Private or incognito windows discard everything when you close them.

Blocking everything will also erase the memory of your consent choice, which means the banner will greet you on every visit. We have not found a way around that irony, and we mention it so that nobody thinks the reappearing banner is a trick.

How long they last

Session cookies disappear when you close the browser. Our consent record is kept for up to six months and then we ask again, because an answer given a year ago is not a current answer. Preference values persist until you clear them. Analytics identifiers run for up to fourteen months. Advertising cookies run from a single day to about two years depending on the vendor, and the exact figure for each is in the consent manager rather than here, where it would go stale.

Where to read more

This page is about the mechanism. Who receives the data, where it travels, the laws that protect you and the rights you can exercise are all in our privacy policy. Questions about cookies go to support@mindcron.com with PRIVACY at the front of the subject line, and other routes to the team are on our contact page.

Last updated: September 2026