Cookies Policy

What Are Cookies?

A cookie is a small text file that a website stores on your device. That's it. The word has accumulated a lot of anxiety around it, mostly because of how aggressively the advertising industry weaponized the technology, but the underlying thing is simple.

Here's what this site actually does with cookies.

The cookies this site uses

Questionable Authority doesn't run advertising, so it has no interest in tracking where you go after you leave, what you buy, or what other sites you visit. The cookies set here are functional — they do a specific job on this site and nothing else.

A session cookie may be set when you visit. It exists only to keep the site working properly during your visit and disappears when you close your browser. It doesn't follow you anywhere.

f you dismiss a notification or set a display preference, a cookie saves that choice so the site doesn't ask you again every time you load a page. That information stays on your device. It doesn't get sent to a server, analyzed, or combined with anything else.

If you leave a comment, the comment form may set a cookie to remember your name and email for next time, so you don't have to retype them. You can clear it by clearing your browser cookies.

That's the full list.

Third-Party Cookies

This is where most cookie policies get uncomfortable, because the honest answer is usually "we use seventeen advertising partners and here are their logos."

The honest answer here is shorter. If the site uses a privacy-respecting analytics tool, it may set its own cookie to count visits in aggregate — no individual tracking, no cross-site profiling. Embedded content from external sources, if any is present on a given page, may load cookies from those domains. We keep embeds to a minimum partly for this reason.

No advertising networks. No social media tracking pixels. No retargeting.

Your options

Every modern browser lets you block or delete cookies. If you block all cookies, this site will still work. You won't lose access to content. The only thing that breaks is preference-saving, which is a minor inconvenience at worst.

You don't need to accept anything to read this site. There's no cookie wall here, no "accept all or pay for access" choice dressed up as a privacy option. Those arrangements exist to extract consent under pressure and they're worth naming for what they are.

If you want to clear cookies set by this site, your browser's settings will handle that. The exact steps vary by browser but a search for "clear cookies [your browser name]" will get you there in under a minute.

The law and this policy

Cookie consent rules exist because of the EU's ePrivacy Directive and GDPR, and similar legislation in the UK and elsewhere. Strictly necessary cookies — the ones that make the site function — don't require consent under most frameworks. Where consent is needed, it should be informed and freely given, not buried in a banner designed to make "accept all" the path of least resistance.

This policy is written to reflect what actually happens, not to satisfy a legal template while obscuring the reality underneath.

Contact

Questions about our use of cookies? Get in touch.