Cookie Policy
What this policy covers
This page explains what cookies and similar technologies are used on internationalfreelancersday.com, what each kind does, and how you can control them. It works alongside our privacy policy, which covers personal data more broadly. The honest summary: we use a small number of cookies ourselves, our analytics and advertising partners use more, and the affiliate links that help fund the site cause cookies to be set on other people’s websites, which deserves a plain explanation rather than a buried clause.
What a cookie is
A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to store, which the browser sends back on later visits. Cookies set by the site you are visiting are first-party cookies; cookies set by other companies whose code runs on the page, such as an ad network, are third-party cookies. Related techniques such as localStorage and pixels do similar jobs, and we use the word cookie here to cover all of them.
Cookies we set ourselves
Our own cookies are few and dull:
- Consent record. When you make a choice in the cookie banner, a cookie records that choice so the banner does not reappear on every page. Deleting it brings the banner back.
- Preferences. If the site offers display preferences, such as a theme choice, a cookie or localStorage entry remembers your setting. It contains the setting and nothing else.
- Security and load management. Our hosting layer may set short-lived cookies to distinguish humans from abusive automated traffic. These are essential and cannot meaningfully be refused while using the site.
Analytics cookies
Analytics cookies let us count visits, see which guides are read and spot when an old article suddenly surges, which for us is often the first sign that a platform changed its fees. The data we look at is aggregate: totals, trends and countries, not named individuals. Where your region’s rules treat analytics cookies as requiring consent, they run only after you accept them in the banner. Declining them does not affect your access to anything.
Advertising cookies
Display advertising helps pay for the site, and ad partners use cookies to serve ads, to cap how often you see the same one, to measure whether ads were seen, and, only with your consent, to personalise ads based on your interests. These are third-party cookies governed by the partners’ own policies. If you decline advertising cookies, ads still appear but become non-personalised. We would rather show you a generic ad than make consent a condition of reading.
Affiliate cookies, explained properly
Some links on this site to platforms and tools are affiliate links, as disclosed on our ownership and funding page. When you click one, the destination site sets a cookie in your browser noting that you arrived through our link. If you later sign up or buy something within that cookie’s lifetime, the platform pays us a commission. Three things to understand:
- The cookie is set by the destination site, on its domain, under its policy. We never see your activity there.
- The price you pay is the same with or without the cookie. The commission comes out of the platform’s marketing budget, not your pocket.
- Clearing your cookies, or completing a purchase in a different browser, breaks the attribution. That costs us the commission and costs you nothing, and you are entirely free to do it.
Managing cookies
You have several layers of control:
- The consent banner. Where required in your region, the banner lets you accept or decline non-essential cookies by category, and you can reopen it to change your mind.
- Browser settings. Every major browser lets you view, block and delete cookies, block third-party cookies wholesale, and clear everything on exit. The browser’s own help pages document the exact steps for the version you run.
- Private browsing. Reading the site in a private window discards cookies when the window closes.
Blocking all cookies may re-trigger the consent banner on each visit, since nothing can remember your choice, but the articles themselves will read fine.
Changes and contact
If our cookie usage changes materially, for example if we add or replace an analytics or advertising partner, we will update this page. Questions about cookies on this site go to support@internationalfreelancersday.com.
