Cookies
Three cookies, one of them optional and off until you say otherwise. This page lists all of them, says what we do and do not record, and lets you change your answer in either direction.
What we trace, and what we never touch
We want to know where the site confuses people. That is the whole of it. PaperAlly asks people to trust it with unpublished work, so a product that quietly read the drafts it audits would deserve nobody's trust.
A trace does not live forever either. Page views, journeys and moments older than 395 days are deleted, and that is done by the code rather than by somebody remembering to do it.
What a trace holds
- The path of a page that was opened. /check, /papers, /legal/cookies. The address of the page and nothing that was on it.
- The order pages were opened in, and the gaps between them. Enough to see that a visit went from the home page to the check page and then stopped.
- The site somebody arrived from, host only. The host, never the full address, because a full address can carry somebody's search terms.
- Moments that matter to the business. That an audit finished, that a record was exported, that a licence was asked about. The fact it happened, not what was in it.
What it never holds
- The content of anybody's work. Not a manuscript, not a title, not a prompt, not a report, not one line of a draft.
- Anything about you anywhere else. No advertising network, no third-party analytics, no cross-site identifier, no fingerprinting.
- Your address. The identifier is a random string with no meaning outside this site, and it is not derived from anything about you.
- A reason to say yes. Decline and the site behaves identically. Nothing is withheld, slowed, or asked again.
Every cookie this site sets
This table is generated from the same list the code reads when it decides what to set, so a cookie that is not here is a cookie that does not exist. If you find one that is not listed, that is a fault and we want to hear about it.
| Cookie | What it is for | How long it lasts | Do we need your consent? |
|---|---|---|---|
| session | Keeps you signed in, holds work you started as a guest so it is not lost, and protects forms against cross-site submission. | Until you close the browser, or 30 days if you asked to be kept signed in | Strictly necessaryNo consent needed: the site cannot work without it and it does nothing else. |
| pa_consent | Remembers the choice you made about analytics, so we do not ask again on every page. | 12 months | Strictly necessaryNo consent needed: it exists only to honour your answer. |
| pa_visitor | A random identifier with no meaning outside this site. It lets us see that one visit moved from the home page to the check page to the report, so we can tell where the site confuses people. | 12 months | Optional, off until you saySet ONLY if you accept analytics. Decline and it is never created. |
Your choice, and changing it
Both directions, at any moment, with one click each way. Saying no later is not harder than saying yes was, and changing your mind takes nothing away from the work already on your screen.
You have not answered yet. Until you do, only the cookies the site cannot work without are set, and nothing is being traced.
If you would rather we held nothing
This erases every page view, journey and moment recorded against this browser, and clears the identifier they were recorded against. It does not change your answer above.
The full privacy notice covers everything else: what is collected at each step, on what basis, how long it is kept, and how to ask for it or have it deleted.