Cookie Policy
The banner you clicked past on your first visit was about this. Some of the code on these pages stores a small file on your device, and the law says we have to ask before the ones that are not strictly necessary go anywhere near you.
This page says what those files are, which ones we cannot switch off, who else sets them, and how to change your answer. What we do with data of any kind is in our privacy policy.
What a cookie actually is
A cookie is a short text file a site asks your browser to keep, holding little more than a name, a value and an expiry date. On your next visit the browser hands it back, which is how a site remembers you already chose dark mode or already dismissed a banner. Nothing in it is a document from your machine, and none of it can read one.
Two other techniques do a similar job and fall under the same rules here. Local storage keeps a value in your browser with no expiry date until something clears it, and it is where a preference is most likely to live. A pixel is a tiny invisible image, or a fragment of script doing the same thing, whose only purpose is to tell a server that a page or an email was opened. Where this page says cookies, it means all three.
The four categories we use
Every file set on this site falls into one of four buckets. Only the first is on when you arrive, and the rest wait for consent and stay off until they get it.
- Strictly necessary. Load balancing, security, protection against a bulk scraper hammering the site, and the record of your own consent choice. Refusing these is not an option, because the record of your refusal is one of them.
- Preferences. Things you set yourself, such as light or dark, text size, and whether a newsletter prompt has been dismissed so it stops asking.
- Analytics. Counting page views, working out how far down an article people got, and telling a visit that arrived from search apart from one that arrived from a newsletter.
- Advertising. Set by the exchanges that fill our display inventory. They count how often an ad was shown, cap how often you see the same one, measure whether anybody clicked, and where you have consented they carry the identifier used to choose which ad you get.
Nothing outside those four is set knowingly. If you find something on this domain that does not fit one of them, write to support@thelittlebinger.com, because it means either a vendor has changed behaviour or we have missed something.
Who sets them, and why no vendor names are printed here
Some cookies come from us and some from other companies. Ours are dull, being the consent record, the preferences, and the counts our analytics provider gathers on our behalf. The advertising ones belong to other businesses, and their code runs in the ad slot rather than in the article.
We name those businesses by category rather than one by one, for a practical reason. Advertising technology reorganises itself constantly, so a list typed into a policy would be wrong within a quarter while still reading as authoritative. The live list, vendor by vendor and purpose by purpose, is inside the consent manager. Which categories of advertiser we refuse outright is a separate matter, set out on our advertise page.
What consent changes about the ads you see
Saying no does not make the advertising disappear. There is no paywall and no subscription here, and the ads are what keep it that way, so they run either way. Refuse consent and what you get is chosen by little more than the page you are reading and the country the request came from, which is the trade’s rather flat name for non-personalised advertising.
Consent turns on the identifiers, and with them an ad chosen using signals built up across other sites you have visited. That inventory is worth more, which is the honest reason we ask rather than assume. Nobody sees a shorter article or an extra prompt for having said no, and the money behind all of it is described on our ownership and funding page.
Changing your mind, here or in your browser
The consent manager is reachable from every page, not only from the banner on a first visit. Opening it shows what you agreed to and when, and lets you switch off any category except the strictly necessary one. A change takes effect immediately, and cookies dropped under the old answer are cleared or expire out.
Your browser is the blunter instrument and the more powerful one. All the major ones can block third-party cookies wholesale, clear what is already stored, and refuse the lot for a single site through the icon at the left of the address bar, while private browsing discards them when the window closes. We also treat a Global Privacy Control signal as an opt-out without a second confirmation. Beyond that the industry runs its own opt-out pages, including YourAdChoices in the United States, Your Online Choices in Europe and the Network Advertising Initiative, and most large ad platforms have a settings page reachable from the small information icon on the ad itself.
How long they last
Session cookies die when you close the browser, and they do the security and load-balancing work. Our consent record lasts six months, at which point the banner comes back, because a two-year-old click is not really an answer to a question about today’s vendor list.
Preferences last about a year. Analytics cookies run to a maximum of fourteen months, matching the retention in our privacy policy. Advertising cookies are set by their own operators with their own lifespans, commonly between thirty days and two years, and the figure for each one sits in the consent manager next to the vendor that sets it.
Last updated: August 2026.
