Cookie Policy
This page lists what gets stored in your browser when you read The Kissing Punk, who puts it there, and how to refuse most of it without losing access to a single article. It sits alongside our privacy policy, which covers the wider question of what we do with reader data.
Last updated: August 2026.
What a cookie is, and what stands in for one
A cookie is a small file a site asks your browser to keep and hand back on the next request. That is the whole mechanism. It is how a site remembers you dismissed a banner, and how an advertising system counts that the unit it is about to serve has been in front of you twice today.
Two other things do the same job and are covered here. Browser storage, meaning localStorage and sessionStorage, holds values without sending them back automatically. Pixels are invisible images or fragments of script loaded from another company’s server, where the request itself is the signal. Where we write cookies below, we mean all three.
The four categories we use
Everything here falls into one of four buckets, and only the first loads before you have made a choice. That order matters more than the labels do, because a consent panel that fires the advertising tags while you are still reading it is decoration.
Refusing the last three costs you nothing. The articles are the same length, the archive stays open, no counter starts. The advertising becomes less relevant, which is our problem rather than yours.
- Strictly necessary: security, load balancing, and the record of your consent choice. These load without asking, and one of them exists so we do not put the same question to you twice.
- Preferences: settings you chose, such as light or dark reading mode, or dismissing a subscription prompt.
- Analytics: which pages were read, for how long, and where readers gave up. This is what tells an editor that a long piece on procurement records held people to the end.
- Advertising: identifiers set by the exchanges that fill our display inventory, used for frequency capping, measurement, fraud checks and, with consent, personalisation.
Why there are no company names on this page
Publishers usually print a table of vendors here. We do not, because such a table is wrong within weeks. Exchanges add and drop partners, a measurement tag is swapped for a better one, an integration is turned off after a bad quarter. A list typed in August and left to rot tells you something precise that has stopped being true.
So the live list sits in the consent panel instead. Open it and you can see every advertising and measurement partner currently active here, what each says it does, the basis it claims, and a switch per purpose. By category, the parties involved are the programmatic exchanges and their measurement partners, our analytics provider, and the hosting and content delivery services that put the pages in front of you. The commercial side is on our advertise with us page.
Personalised and non-personalised advertising
With consent, the exchanges may use identifiers and inferred interests to choose which advert you see. Without consent, you still get advertising, chosen from the page you are on and rough signals such as country and language rather than from a profile of you. Non-personalised inventory pays us less. That is the honest trade and we are not going to dress it up.
A few advertising tags run whatever you choose, doing work that is not targeting: counting whether an advert rendered at all, and checking that a click came from a human rather than a fraud network. Where a partner claims a legitimate interest beyond that, you can object purpose by purpose in the panel.
Changing your mind
The consent panel is reachable at any time from the link in the site footer, and it opens with your current answers showing rather than as a blank slate. Withdraw consent and the non-essential tags stop firing from that point. It cannot reach backwards for data already collected, which is a limit of the technology rather than a position of ours.
Your browser has stronger tools than our panel does. Every major browser will block third-party cookies outright, clear what is already stored, or refuse everything for one site, usually under privacy or site settings. Blocking cookies site-wide can break the consent record itself, so the panel will greet you again on your next visit. That is the mechanism working rather than a fault.
Industry opt-outs and lifespans
Some opt-out routes cover many advertising companies at once. The YourAdChoices page run by the Digital Advertising Alliance and the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out tool both apply broadly, and if you hold a Google account, its own ad settings page controls personalisation across services that use it. On a phone, look for limiting ad tracking or resetting the advertising identifier, which lives in the operating system rather than the browser.
On lifespans: session cookies die when you close the tab, our consent record is kept for months so we are not asking you the same question weekly, and preference settings last about a year. Analytics identifiers expire on the retention window we hold with our provider, measured in months. Advertising identifiers are set by the partner rather than by us, usually for months rather than years, with the figure shown against each vendor in the panel.
Changes to this policy
When the categories change, or a new kind of tag appears on the site, this page is updated and the date at the top moves with it. Material changes are noted on the page rather than slipped in.
Anything unclear here, including a specific cookie you found in your browser and want explained, goes to support@thekissingpunk.com. Send the cookie name and the page you were on, and an editor will find out what set it.
