This page covers cookies and equivalent storage — local storage, session storage, and device identifiers — on exchangeanchor.com. It sits alongside Privacy, which covers the wider question of what data is collected and by whom.

Reading articles sets no first-party cookies

Public article pages on this site are served from cache and do not read or write first-party cookies. That is a deliberate architectural choice — it keeps pages fast and cacheable — and it has a privacy consequence worth stating: simply reading this site creates no first-party record of you.

Categories in use

Strictly necessary. Set only if you sign in. A session cookie keeps you signed in across pages and is deleted when you sign out. Without it there is no way to have an account at all, so it cannot be switched off while you are using one.

Analytics. Where Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager is active, it stores an identifier for your browser to distinguish a returning reader from a new one and to attribute a session to a referrer. It tells us which articles are read. It is not used to build a profile of you here.

Advertising. Where Google AdSense and its partners are active, they may store identifiers to select ads, limit repeat impressions of the same ad, and measure clicks and conversions. This is the category that operates across sites, and the one most people mean when they say they are being tracked. Their processing is governed by their policies, not by this page.

Embedded media. Third-party media embedded in an article may set its own storage when the embed loads.

Turning them off

  • Browser settings. Every current browser can block third-party cookies outright, and several do by default. This stops most advertising storage without affecting your ability to read anything here.
  • Clearing storage. Clearing cookies for this site and for the ad networks resets their identifiers.
  • Google's controls. Google offers ad personalization settings and an analytics browser opt-out that apply everywhere those products run.
  • Content blockers. A blocker prevents the tags loading in the first place. This site is built to function fully when they are blocked — nothing here is held hostage to an ad script running.
  • Consent tools. Where a consent prompt is shown in your region, the choice you make there governs the non-essential categories, and you can reopen it to change your mind.

What we do not do with cookies

  • We do not use them to collect anything sensitive.
  • We do not sell or share reader data with data brokers.
  • We do not put an email address, or anything else that identifies you personally, into an analytics or advertising event.
  • We do not use "cookie walls" — nothing on this site is gated behind accepting non-essential storage.

Why any of this exists

A cookie is a small piece of text a site asks your browser to store and send back on the next request. That mechanism is unremarkable on its own — it is how a site remembers you are signed in between page loads.

What made cookies a privacy question is the third-party case. When a resource loads from another domain, that domain can set its own storage, and because the same domain appears on thousands of sites, the identifier it stores can link your visits across all of them. That is the difference between remembering a session and building a profile, and it is the distinction the categories below are organized around.

Modern browsers also offer local storage, session storage, and similar mechanisms. They differ technically but raise the same question, so this page treats them together and uses "cookies" as shorthand for all of them.

The categories on this site

Strictly necessary. Storage without which something you asked for cannot work. Here that means a signed-in session and, where one is shown, the record of your own consent choice. It is set only in response to something you did, and it is not used for advertising.

Analytics. Aggregate measurement of which pages are read and how people arrive. It informs what gets written next. It is not used to build a profile of an individual reader on this site.

Advertising. Set by the advertising network to select ads, limit repetition, and measure whether an ad worked. This is the category with the broadest reach, because the same network is present on many other sites.

Reading this site sets nothing in the first category until you sign in. Public pages are served from cache without a session, which is why they are fast and why storage inspection on an article shows an empty first-party list.

Seeing what is actually set

You do not have to take this page's word for any of it, and checking takes about a minute.

Every current browser ships developer tools that list storage for the page you are on, usually under a Storage or Application panel, broken down by the domain that set each item. Open it on any article here and you will see the first-party list is empty until you sign in, and that the entries which do appear belong to the advertising and analytics domains named above.

That check is worth doing on any site that publishes a page like this one. A cookie policy is a claim; storage inspection is evidence.

Turning categories off, by browser

The specific menu path changes with every release, so the reliable instruction is the shape rather than the exact clicks. In each browser, the setting lives in privacy or content settings, under cookies or site data, and offers a choice between allowing all, blocking third-party, and blocking all.

  • Blocking third-party cookies is the setting that matters. It stops cross-site advertising identifiers while leaving sign-in on sites you use intact. Several browsers now do this by default.
  • Blocking all cookies also works here for reading, since public pages set none. It will break signing in, on this site and most others.
  • Clearing site data resets identifiers already stored, including the advertising ones. Doing it periodically limits how long any profile persists.
  • Private or incognito windows discard everything on close, which is a per-session version of the same thing.

On mobile, the same controls exist in the browser's settings, and both major mobile platforms additionally offer a system-level advertising identifier control that applies across apps as well as sites.

Who the third parties are

The parties that may set storage while you read are the ones described above: Google's advertising and analytics products, and the provider of any media embedded in a specific article. There is no separate ecosystem of data brokers operating here, because we do not add one.

We are not able to enumerate every downstream advertising partner a programmatic network may involve — no publisher using programmatic advertising can, honestly. What we can tell you is which product is on the page, so you know whose controls to use, and that is what the categories above do.

What changes if you block everything

Nothing you came for. Article text, images, navigation, and search all work with every non-essential category blocked, because none of them depend on advertising or analytics running.

What actually changes: we lose the aggregate reading data that tells us which articles help people, and the ads either do not appear or appear untargeted. Neither is your problem to solve, and the site is deliberately built so that it is not.

Changes

Ad and analytics vendors change their own storage without asking us. When the categories described here change materially, this page changes and its visible updated date changes with it.