Cookie policy

We set no cookies of our own. Advertising partners do -- this page explains which, why, and how to switch them off.

Last updated

This page is about storage: what this site puts in your browser, what other companies put there while their advertisements are on screen, and how to stop any of it. It sits alongside the privacy policy, which covers the wider picture.

The short answer

Life Calculator sets no cookies at all. There is no account to keep you signed in to, no basket to remember, no session to maintain and no in-house measurement to feed, so a cookie would have nothing to do. The only trace this site leaves in your browser is a theme setting, described below, and that is not a cookie either.

Nothing you calculate is written down

The reason this page is so short is that the calculators keep no state. A figure you type into a field exists as a number inside the JavaScript running that page, and that is the whole extent of its existence. It is not copied into a cookie, not put into local or session storage, not cached, and not sent over the network to us or to anyone else. Close or reload the page and it stops existing.

That carries one visible cost, worth naming: come back tomorrow and the fields are empty again, because there was never anywhere for yesterday's numbers to be kept. We think that is the right trade.

The theme setting

One value is stored, under the key lc-theme, using the browser's local storage rather than a cookie. It records which of the two color schemes you picked so that the next page you open matches. Local storage is never attached to an outgoing request, so unlike a cookie this value is not transmitted anywhere; it carries no identifier and would be meaningless to anyone who read it. It remains until you clear site data for this domain, and clearing it costs you nothing but the color scheme.

What the terms mean

A cookie is a short string a site asks the browser to file away and hand back with every later request to the same domain. Local storage also holds a string, but the browser never volunteers it -- only script running on the page can read it. Pixels and web beacons are tiny requests for an image or an empty file, made so that the act of requesting can be counted. All three are in scope for this page.

Storage that arrives with the advertisements

Display advertising pays for the site. The slots are filled by external advertising networks -- Google AdSense and the partners it distributes through among them -- and those networks run their own storage inside your browser for purposes that include:

  • deciding which advertisement to render and confirming that it appeared;
  • capping how often a given advertisement is repeated at you;
  • reporting on how a campaign performed;
  • spotting invalid traffic and fraudulent clicks;
  • tailoring what is shown to the browsing behavior of the person viewing it, where consent rules allow and no opt-out is in force.

Names you may come across in a browser storage inspector include Google's IDE and DSID, along with test_cookie, which is written and read straight back as a capability check. Which names actually turn up differs from one partner to the next, from one region to another, and according to what you have consented to. None of it is under our control: we do not choose these cookies, cannot open them, and never see the audience segments they feed.

Storage from the host

Netlify serves the files. In narrow technical situations -- following a redirect, absorbing a burst of abusive traffic -- its edge may write a cookie of its own. Such a cookie does no advertising work and builds no profile.

In places whose law requires permission before non-essential storage is written, the EU and UK ePrivacy regimes chief among them, that permission is sought through the consent interface our advertising partner presents, and personalized advertising storage should not be written before it is given. The same interface lets you revise the answer later. Clearing cookies and then blocking them in the browser has much the same practical effect and depends on nobody honoring anything.

Switching it off

Vendor-level opt-outs, each covering a different slice of the industry:

Browser-level controls are blunter and more dependable. Every current browser can refuse third-party cookies, purge whatever is already stored, or refuse cookies outright; the settings usually live under a heading such as "Privacy and security" or "Cookies and site data". A private window achieves much the same for the length of one session, discarding everything when it closes.

Global Privacy Control is a signal some browsers and extensions transmit on your behalf, declaring that you do not want your personal information sold or shared. Advertising partners are expected to act on it wherever the law makes it binding.

With everything blocked

Nothing on this site stops working. Every calculator, every explanation, every link and every page of text behaves exactly as it otherwise would, because none of it depends on storage of any kind -- only on first-party JavaScript, which is not a cookie and is unaffected by cookie settings. The one difference you may notice is that the advertisements become generic rather than targeted.

Updates

If the storage picture changes in any way that matters, this page and the date on it will be updated. Questions go to privacy@lifecalculator.space.