Last Updated: September 2026
A short, honest list — this site uses very few cookies, and none of them are used to identify you personally.
A cookie is a small text file a website can store in your browser to remember something between visits — a login session, a language choice, or which pages you've looked at. Cookies come in two broad categories: first-party cookies, set directly by the site you're visiting, and third-party cookies, set by an outside service embedded in that site (an analytics tool, an ad network, a video player, and so on). Neither type can read files on your computer or install anything — they're just small pieces of text a browser stores and sends back to whichever service set them.
Since this site has no login system, no shopping cart, and no personalisation beyond a theme toggle, our own use of cookies is genuinely minimal. Most of what tracks anything here comes from the two Google tools we use, covered below.
We don't set any first-party cookies ourselves. The one thing we do remember — your dark or light theme choice — is stored using your browser's local storage, a related but technically distinct mechanism from a cookie. Local storage stays on your device only, is never transmitted back to our servers on each page load the way a cookie is, and has no expiry date beyond you clearing your browser's site data manually. We mention this distinction because many sites carelessly call every stored preference "a cookie" even when it isn't — we'd rather be precise.
We use Google Analytics and Google Ads to understand how many people visit the site, which pages get the most attention, and how effective anything we promote turns out to be. These are standard, widely-used tools that the large majority of websites rely on for the same basic reasons — without them, we'd have no way to know whether a page redesign helped or hurt, or whether visitors are finding what they came for. Both tools set their own cookies in your browser once you land on the site, typically including:
| Cookie | Purpose | Typical duration | Set by |
|---|---|---|---|
_ga | Distinguishes unique visitors for analytics reporting | ~2 years | Google Analytics |
_ga_* | Tracks session state and page views for analytics | ~2 years | Google Analytics |
_gid | Distinguishes visitors over a rolling 24-hour window | 24 hours | Google Analytics |
_gcl_au | Stores and measures ad click conversions | ~90 days | Google Ads |
None of these cookies contain your name, your email address, or any other information that directly identifies you as a person — each one just holds an anonymous, randomly-generated identifier that lets Google's systems recognise a returning browser. We don't receive individual-level data from either tool ourselves; what we see is aggregated reporting (for example, "1,200 people visited the homepage this week"), not a record tied to any one visitor. Both tools are governed entirely by Google's own privacy and cookie policies, available at policies.google.com/technologies/cookies and policies.google.com/privacy.
Being a free site with no accounts and no payments, we don't have the kind of built-in usage data a login system would naturally provide. Analytics is effectively our only window into whether the site is working well for the people using it — which predictions pages get checked most often, whether visitors are finding the market they're looking for, and whether changes we make (like the ones throughout this rebuild) actually improve things. We've deliberately kept this to the minimum needed for that purpose, rather than adding additional tracking, heatmaps, session recording, or third-party advertising networks beyond Google's own.
You're always free to view, block, or delete cookies through your browser's own settings. The exact menu differs slightly by browser:
Blocking Google's cookies won't affect your ability to use any part of this site — every prediction, market page, and article works exactly the same either way. The only difference is that your visit won't show up in our traffic data. If you'd rather opt out of Google Analytics specifically, across every website that uses it rather than just this one, Google provides an official Analytics opt-out browser add-on for that purpose.
Some browsers offer a "Do Not Track" setting. There's currently no single, universally agreed way for websites to respond to that signal, so like most sites, we don't currently change our behaviour based on it — the cookie controls described above are the reliable way to manage tracking on this site regardless of that setting.
If the tools we use, or the cookies they set, ever change — for example, if we add a new analytics provider or discontinue one of the current ones — we'll update this page and the "Last Updated" date above to reflect it. We don't maintain an email list to notify people of policy changes, since collecting one would run against the minimal-data approach described here.
See our full privacy policy for how we handle data more broadly, beyond just cookies, and our terms of service for the rest of the site's ground rules.
Questions about cookies or tracking on this site can go to support@accuratetip.com, or see our contact page for other ways to reach us.