Cookie Policy

This page lists what gets stored in your browser when you read FAQ Answers, who put it there, and how to make it stop. Last updated: August 2026.

The consent notice you saw on your first visit is the short version. This is the long one, and it exists because a banner with two buttons cannot honestly explain what it is asking permission for.

What a cookie is, and what else is going on

A cookie is a small text file a site asks your browser to keep and hand back on your next request. That is the whole mechanism. It is how a site remembers your consent choice without asking again on every page, and it is also how an advertising network recognises the same browser across different sites.

Two other things behave like cookies without being cookies. Local storage holds settings in your browser under our domain, which is where a preference like text size lives. A pixel is a tiny invisible image whose only job is to be requested, so the server logs the request. Where this page says cookies, it means all three.

The categories we use

There are four, and the difference is who they serve. The first two make the site work for you. The second two pay for it, which is why they wait for your permission and the first two do not.

Nothing in the analytics or advertising categories is set before you choose. Until then the site runs on the necessary cookies alone and the advertising is non-personalised.

• Strictly necessary. Security, load balancing, the record of your consent choice, and the session that keeps you logged into a comment account. No off switch, because off means the site is off.
• Preferences. Settings you chose, such as text size and whether the newsletter prompt has been dismissed.
• Analytics. How many people read a story, which pages they arrived from, and where readers give up. We use it to decide which questions from the query log deserve more work.
• Advertising. Set by the exchanges that fill our display inventory, for frequency capping, measuring whether an ad was seen, fraud checks and, with consent, personalisation.

Who else sets one on our pages

We set the necessary and preference cookies ourselves. The rest are set by somebody we pay or somebody who pays us: our analytics provider, the consent manager that stores your choice, the email service that measures newsletter opens, and the programmatic exchanges and their buyers.

We are not going to print a partner table, and it is worth saying why. Our exchange list changes month to month, buyers get added by an exchange without asking us, and we keep a block list of ones we refuse. A table published today would be wrong by the time you read it, which is worse than no table. Write to support@faq-ans.com and we will send the list as it stands on the day you ask.

Personalised advertising, and what your choice changes

If you consent to advertising cookies, the exchanges may use an identifier to serve ads chosen partly on the basis of browsing they recorded elsewhere. That is personalised advertising, and it pays more, which is the entire commercial argument for it.

If you refuse, you still see ads. They are chosen from the page you are on and a rough location instead, which earns us less and costs you nothing. No story is hidden behind a consent choice, no feature is disabled, and nothing is nagged at you afterwards. The rules our advertising partners work under are on the advertise with us page.

Changing your mind, and doing it at the browser level

The consent manager is linked in the footer of every page. Change a category and it takes effect on the next page you load. No cooling-off period, no confirmation email.

Your browser is the stronger control, because it applies to every site rather than only to us. Every current browser lets you block third-party cookies outright, clear what is already stored, and run a private window that keeps nothing. Clearing everything also clears our record of your consent, so the notice will ask again. That is the notice working, not a fault.

There are industry opt-out pages that cover many networks at once: the Digital Advertising Alliance’s YourAdChoices, the Network Advertising Initiative’s opt-out tool, and Your Online Choices for European readers. If you hold an account with one of the large platforms, its own ad settings page usually carries a switch for personalisation everywhere it serves ads. We have not linked to them because those addresses move and a dead link is worse than a name you can search.

How long these last

Session cookies die when you close the browser, and the security and load-balancing ones are mostly of that kind. Our record of your consent lasts 12 months, after which the notice asks again. Preference cookies last up to 12 months, and analytics identifiers up to 24 months from your most recent visit.

Advertising cookies are the ones we control least. They typically run from 30 days to 24 months, and the lifetimes are set by the partner rather than by us. Deleting them in your browser removes them regardless of what any partner intended.

Where this sits next to the privacy policy

This page covers what is stored on your device. What we then do with the data, the legal basis for each purpose, how long records are kept and the rights you can use against us are in our privacy policy, the page to read if you want something deleted.

Both get the same treatment when they change. New date, a note at the top saying what changed, and a line in the newsletter if it affects what you consented to. Questions go to support@faq-ans.com with PRIVACY in the subject line, and the editors read that inbox themselves.