Cookies
Every cookie this site sets, what each one does, how long it lasts, and which of them you can refuse.
Most cookie pages are written to make a long list of trackers sound reasonable. This one is short because the list is short, and it is specific because a cookie notice that describes cookies in general rather than the ones actually being set is not telling you anything.
The short version
InAutoNews sets no advertising cookies and no tracking cookies, and nothing here follows you between visits or between sites. Two cookies exist, both are required for the site to work, and UK law does not ask you to consent to either.
The cookies we set
Both are set by the software that runs the site rather than by anyone else. Neither carries an identifier of a person, and neither is read by any other website.
| Cookie | What it does | Lasts |
|---|---|---|
| Session | Lets the application keep track of a single browsing session, which is what makes a form submission work. It holds no identifier of a person and is not used to recognise you on a later visit. | Until it expires or you close the browser |
| CSRF token | A random value proving that a form was submitted from this site and not by another website acting in your name. Without it the contact form would be usable as a weapon against you. | Two hours |
Both are what the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations call strictly necessary, which is the category the consent requirement does not apply to. We could show you a banner about them anyway. It would be a banner asking permission for something you cannot refuse without breaking the site, and those have done real damage to the idea that consent means anything.
How we count readers without a cookie
Page views are counted on our own server, and no cookie is involved. What is recorded is the page, the site you arrived from if there was one, whether the request looked like a crawler, and a one way fingerprint used to tell one visitor from another within a single day.
The fingerprint is a digest of your IP address and browser string mixed with a secret that changes at midnight. It cannot be reversed into either. Because the secret rotates daily, the same person visiting tomorrow produces a completely different value, so nobody can join your visits into a history. Raw records are kept for 45 days and then reduced to daily totals. No IP address is stored.
This is why the site can count its readers without asking you for anything. The fuller account is on the privacy notice.
Analytics
No third party analytics service runs on this site. There is no Google Analytics tag, no Facebook pixel, and no measurement script of any kind loading from another company's servers.
Advertising
InAutoNews sets no advertising cookies, runs no ad network code, and shares nothing about you with an advertiser. There is no audience segment built here, and nothing about your reading is sold.
If that ever changes, this page will say so before it happens, you will be asked to choose, and refusing will be as easy as accepting. How advertising works here more generally is on the advertising page.
Third parties
Images from the archive that we have not yet copied locally are served by redirecting your browser to the Internet Archive, which will therefore see that request and apply its own privacy policy to it. It is the only external service a page here can send you to without you clicking something.
Nothing else on a page loads from another company's servers. No web fonts from a font service, no embedded video player waiting on the page, no social media buttons that phone home before you touch them.
Local storage
Local storage is not a cookie, but it is storage on your device and the same
honesty applies to it. This site uses one entry, and only when a consent choice
exists to remember: a value under the key consent recording whether
you accepted or refused analytics. It never leaves your browser and it is not sent
with any request.
Clearing your site data removes it, at which point you would be asked again if there were anything to ask about.
Your choices
Because nothing here requires consent, there is nothing for you to withdraw and no preference for us to remember. Blocking cookies in your browser will not stop you reading the site, and it will not degrade anything except the contact form, which needs the security token to work.
We honour Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track signals in the only way that is meaningful here, which is that there is nothing for them to switch off. We do not treat either signal as a reason to collect more.
Controlling cookies in your browser
Every browser lets you see the cookies a site has set, delete them, and block them for particular sites or entirely. It is usually under privacy or site settings, and the browser's own help pages describe it better than we can.
Blocking cookies on this site costs you the contact form. Nothing else on it depends on one.
If this changes
The date at the foot of this page is when it was last reviewed. Any new cookie appears in the table above before it starts being set, not afterwards. If you find a cookie from this site that is not listed here, that is a fault and we would like to know about it.
Last reviewed .