This site sets no cookies.

This site sets no cookies

Not “essential cookies only” — none at all, unless you press Allow on the analytics banner, which lets Google Analytics set its own. That holds for the embedded YouTube player either way, and it was measured rather than assumed: loading a clip from youtube-nocookie.com set no cookies at all.

That is less a virtue than a consequence of how the site is built. It is a set of files with no application behind them: no sessions to keep, no accounts to remember, no basket, no measurement. There is nothing a cookie could usefully hold.

Cookies are not the whole of the question, though. The rules cover anything stored on or read from your device, whatever it is called — so the two sections below cover the two things that genuinely are. One of them you choose. One of them you are not asked about.

The one thing stored on your device

The site has a light theme and a dark one. If you press the switch in the header, that choice is written to your browser's local storage so the next page you open does not undo it.

Name

nhm-theme

Kind

Local storage, not a cookie. It is never attached to a request, so it is never sent to this site or to anyone else.

Value

The single word light or dark. No identifier, no timestamp, no visit count, nothing else.

Written

Only when you use the theme switch. If you never touch it nothing is ever stored — the site reads the value on each page, but writes none of its own.

Expires

Never by itself. It stays until you clear it.

Purpose

Remembering the one display preference you set. It cannot identify you and is used for nothing else.

Nothing asks you about this one and the reason is practical rather than legal: nothing is stored unless you press the switch and pressing the switch is the request. If you never touch it, there is nothing stored to ask about.

That reasoning covers the theme and nothing else. The video is the part it does not cover.

Clearing it

Clear it the way you would clear a cookie: in your browser's settings, under site data or “cookies and other site data”, find nickhutsonmusic.com and delete it. Browsing in a private window has the same effect — nothing survives the window.

Clearing it breaks nothing. The site falls back to whatever your operating system's own light or dark setting says.

When a video loads

The other thing that can reach your device comes from YouTube and this site does not ask you about it or obtain your consent for it. Saying so plainly is the point of this page.

Videos you press play on load nothing before you click. The silent clip behind the home page heading and behind the headings of case studies that have footage, is different: a YouTube player loads by itself about a second after the page opens and starts playing, muted, with no action from you. The home page moves on to a new clip roughly every twenty-two seconds and each one is a fresh player load.

Anything playing follows you. Turn that clip's sound on and it keeps going as you move around the site, onto pages that have no video behind their own heading — this one among them — and each page you stay on loads a new player rather than continuing the old one, so it is a fresh session with Google every time. Press play on a video and dismiss the window while it is still going and it follows you too, onto any page at all; that one is the same player kept alive rather than reloaded, so it is a single session however far you go. A page whose own clip would normally start does not start it while you are carrying one. Only one thing is ever audible, so starting anything else — or stopping it from the play bar — ends it.

Neither happens on a fresh page load. Arrive here having started nothing and nothing is requested from Google. The reel also ignores a page you only pass through: nothing is requested for the first second and a half, so clicking straight past loads nothing at all.

Measured in a clean browser, that sets no cookies — none at all. What it does do is let Google's player keep a few housekeeping entries of its own (buffering, captions, an icon cache) in storage on youtube-nocookie.com, which is Google's domain and not this one: this site does not set them, cannot read them and cannot clear them. It also tells Google your IP address, which page you are on and what browser you are using. The privacy notice has the full account.

Setting your device or browser to reduce motion stops everything you did not ask for — measured: no request to any Google server and nothing stored. It does not stop a video you press play on yourself, which is the point of it; you can end that from the play bar. Blocking third-party frames stops even that. The pages still work; you get the still image instead of the clip.

What you will not find

• Analytics cookies, unless you allowed them. Google Analytics sets one after you press Allow, and none before. Matomo runs cookieless and sets none at all.
• Advertising or retargeting cookies. Nothing here is advertised or sold.
• Social media pixels, or share buttons that report back.
• A/B testing or personalisation cookies.
• Session or authentication cookies, because there are no accounts.
• Fingerprinting, device identifiers or any other cookie substitute.
• A consent banner or consent management platform. There is none — the section above says what that means in practice.

A cookie policy on a site like this one that listed a neat table of analytics cookies would be describing a site that does not exist. This page lists what is actually there: one preference you set, no cookies at all and one embedded player that does its own thing.

If that ever changes

If this site ever sets a cookie of its own — a hosted contact form, a measurement tool, an embedded map — this page changes before it ships. The same goes the other way: if the clip behind the headline ever stops loading on its own, the section above gets shorter.