Cookie Policy

This policy covers https://mordevarcane.com. It sits alongside our Privacy Policy, which explains the wider picture of what we do with personal information.

A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to keep, so that it can recognise the same browser again later. Related technologies do the same job by other means: local storage and session storage keep data in the browser itself rather than sending it back with every request.

Some are set by us. Others are set by companies whose content we embed — YouTube, for instance, sets its own cookies when you play a video, and we cannot see or control them. Both kinds are listed below.

In the UK, the EU and EEA, Switzerland, Brazil, Canada and a number of other countries with equivalent rules: nothing optional has loaded when you arrive. No analytics, and no videos. You are shown a card with three plainly equal choices — accept, refuse, or decide category by category — and until you pick one, nothing happens. Closing the card without choosing counts as refusing.

Everywhere else: anonymous analytics starts when the page does, and a small bar at the bottom tells you so, with the same controls one click away. Videos and every advertising signal still stay switched off until you choose them — those are never assumed, anywhere.

Two things override all of the above. If we cannot tell where you are — a VPN, a corporate network, a browser that hides it — you get the stricter version. And if your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal we treat that as a refusal in every country, act on it immediately, and do not ask you again.

Refusing is one click, exactly like accepting. We do not make you hunt through menus to say no, we do not pre-tick anything, and refusing does not lock you out of any part of this site.

We keep a fourth category, Preferences, in our system for settings that remember how you like the site to behave. We do not currently use anything in it, so it is not shown as a switch. Choosing “Accept” allows every category listed here including that one, so that if we ever do use it, your answer already covers it. If you would rather it stayed off, use Cookie Preferences and refuse instead.

Everything this site is capable of setting. Items in the optional categories only ever appear once you have allowed them.

If you allow Statistics, we load Google Analytics. It tells us which pages people reach, roughly where in the world they are, what device they use, and whether anything is broken. It does not tell us your name, your email, or who you are.

We run Google Consent Mode v2. In practice that means that if you refuse, Google receives a signal that you said no and sets no cookies at all — and we see only a modelled estimate of overall traffic rather than anything about you. We also switch on Google’s advertising data redaction by default. There are no advertising pixels on this website: no Meta pixel, no Google Ads tag, no LinkedIn or TikTok tag.

Our showreels are hosted on YouTube, which is a third party with its own privacy terms and sits in the Marketing category. Our booking calendar no longer does: it used to be Calendly, and is now our own scheduler running on our own systems. It sets no advertising cookies, hands your details to nobody, and therefore needs no permission from you before it loads.

• Videos use youtube-nocookie.com, YouTube's privacy-enhanced player, which holds off on advertising cookies until a video actually plays.
• Until you allow Marketing, each video shows a still image and a play button. Pressing play loads that one video and nothing else — it is not treated as consent for everything.
• The booking calendar on our contact page is ours. What you type into it — your name, email and answers — comes to us directly and is used to arrange the meeting, nothing else.

Cookie Preferences opens the same card at any time, and there is a permanent link to it in the footer of every page.

If you switch Statistics off after having had it on, we delete the Google Analytics cookies we can reach and reload the page, because analytics code cannot be unloaded from a page once it has started.

One honest limit: a cookie set by another company sits on theirdomain, and a website is not permitted to delete cookies belonging to a domain it does not own. So if you had already played a video, YouTube’s own cookies survive your withdrawal even though we stop loading anything further from them. Clearing those means clearing cookies in your browser settings — section 10 — and every website is in the same position on this, whatever their policy says.

Your answer is stored on your own device for 6 months and then we ask again. We also ask again whenever this policy changes in a way that affects what you agreed to — your stored answer is tied to the version of the policy you saw, so it expires automatically rather than being carried over to terms you never read.

We keep a record of the choice itself — the date, the categories, the policy version, and a shortened form of your IP address — so that we can demonstrate we asked you properly. That record is kept for 24 months. It is described in section 4 of our Privacy Policy.

Every major browser lets you see, block and delete cookies from its settings, usually under Privacy. Blocking cookies site-wide may break other websites; it will not break this one.

We also honour Global Privacy Control. If your browser or an extension sends that signal, we treat it as a refusal of the optional categories and do not ask again.

If we add a third party or a new cookie, this register is updated in the same change that adds it, and the date at the top changes. Because the register and the code that enforces it are driven by the same list, this page cannot silently fall out of date.