Cookie policy

What a cookie is

A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to keep, so that the next page you open knows something the last one did. That is the whole mechanism. Some cookies are needed for a site to function at all, some remember a choice you made, and some exist only to follow you around the internet. We use the first two kinds. We do not use the third.

This policy covers growthmessenger.com only. It is published by GrowthMessenger Ltd, company number 134827C, registered in the Isle of Man. Our registered office is Third Floor, St George's Court, Upper Church Street, Douglas IM1 1EE, Isle of Man.

The cookies this site sets

Three, and that is the full list. Each one is set by us, from our own domain. None of them can be read by any other site.

• gm_sid - the session cookie. It holds a short random identifier so that a form you started on one page still knows what you typed when you land on the next one. It carries no name, no address and no message content. Lifetime: deleted when you close the browser. Category: strictly necessary.
• gm_consent - the consent-choice cookie. It records what you told the cookie notice, so we do not ask you the same question on every page. If you refuse analytics, this cookie is the thing that remembers your refusal, which is why we set it either way. Lifetime: six months, then we ask again. Category: strictly necessary.
• gm_a - the analytics cookie. It carries a value that identifies your browser for one day so that four pages read in one sitting are counted as one visit rather than four. The value is rotated every night and is never reused, so it cannot be joined up into a history of you. Lifetime: 24 hours. Category: analytics, set only if you agree.

The rate calculator on this site keeps the figures you type in your browser's own local storage rather than in a cookie, so those numbers never reach us. Clearing site data in your browser clears them.

What this site does not set

No advertising cookies. No cross-site tracking cookies. No retargeting pixels, no social network buttons that phone home, no third party tag manager loading things we have not listed. We do not sell or share browsing data with anyone, because we do not collect the kind that would be worth selling.

Nobody else is allowed to set a cookie through this site either. Everything the pages load - fonts, images, scripts - is served from our own domain for that reason. If you inspect the cookie jar after a visit and find something that is not on the list above, we want to know about it. Write to growth@growthmessenger.com and we will chase it down.

Why the analytics are the quiet kind

We want to know which pages get read and which are ignored. That is the entire question. We do not need to know who read them, so the analytics we run are self-hosted, aggregate the moment they land, truncate the last part of every network address before storing anything, and keep nothing that could be tied back to a person. There is no analytics account at a large advertising company sitting behind this site.

If you refuse analytics, gm_a is never written and your visit is not counted. Nothing else changes.

How we ask

On your first visit you get a plain notice with two equally weighted choices. Accepting and refusing take the same single click. There is no pre-ticked box, no buried settings panel, no second dialogue trying to talk you out of a refusal. Until you choose, only the strictly necessary cookies exist.

Changing your mind later

Consent is not a one-way door. The Cookies link in the footer of every page brings you back here and reopens the notice, so you can set it the other way in one click. A refusal takes effect immediately and deletes gm_a on the spot. You can also just clear the cookies for growthmessenger.com in your browser, which wipes the consent record along with everything else and means you will be asked again on your next visit.

Controlling cookies in your browser

Your browser is the stronger control, and it applies to every site rather than just this one. In Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari the relevant screen is under privacy settings and lets you do all of the following:

• See every cookie currently stored, per site, and delete individual ones.
• Block third party cookies outright, which we would recommend to anyone.
• Clear cookies automatically each time you close the browser.
• Refuse all cookies, at the cost of breaking a fair number of other sites.

Private or incognito windows discard everything at the end of the session, which is a reasonable way to read this site if you would rather leave nothing at all behind. If your browser sends a global privacy signal, we treat it as a refusal of analytics without asking you again.

Refusing does not break anything

There is no walled-off content here and no feature that depends on being tracked. Refuse the analytics cookie and every page still loads, the calculator still calculates, and the quote form still submits. The only difference is that your reading does not show up in our monthly count of which pages are worth keeping. We would rather have an accurate site than an accurate chart.

Campaign links are a different thing entirely

This matters, and it is the one place people mix us up. The tracking links inside campaigns we run for an operator have nothing to do with the cookies on this website. They are separate systems with separate rules.

• Those links sit on the operator's own short domain, not ours. The player clicks through to the operator's site, and any cookie that gets set there is set by the operator, under the operator's own cookie and privacy policy.
• The signed identifier on such a link exists so a deposit can be matched back to the message that caused it, for that operator, on that campaign. It is not a browsing profile and it is not used for advertising.
• The operator is the controller for that data. We act on their instructions. If you received a message and want to know what was recorded, the operator whose name was on the message is the right party to ask, and they can ask us.
• Nothing from a campaign is joined to anything on growthmessenger.com. A visitor here and a player there are never the same record in any system we run.

Our privacy policy sets out that split in more detail, including what we hold as controller and what we only ever process for a client.

Changes to this policy

If we add a cookie, this page changes before the cookie ships, and the date at the top of the page moves. If a change means the analytics do something they did not do before, we ask you again rather than assuming the old answer still stands. We do not expect any of this to happen often. The list has been three cookies long for a while.

Asking us about it

Write to growth@growthmessenger.com and a person reads it. If you think this site set something it should not have, say so and we will look the same day. You also have the right to complain to the Isle of Man Information Commissioner, and you do not have to go through us first, though it is usually faster if you do.

GrowthMessenger Ltd, company number 134827C. Third Floor, St George's Court, Upper Church Street, Douglas IM1 1EE, Isle of Man.