Privacy policy

Cookin’ is a personal recipe website. You should be able to read it, cook from it and join in without handing over more about yourself than you need to. This page explains, in plain language, exactly what the site stores, why, and for how long.

The short version

You can read everything here without an account and without being tracked. The site counts visits itself, without cookies and without storing IP addresses, to see which recipes people read and how they find them.
There are no ads, no outside analytics services, no social media widgets and no third-party trackers. Fonts are served by this site itself; pages and photos travel through two delivery networks, described below.
The site only stores what you choose to give it: a comment, a star rating, or your email address for the newsletter.
Visitor IP addresses are never stored. Where the site needs to recognise repeated requests (to stop spam), it keeps a keyed one-way hash of the address instead.

Reading the site

When you open a page, your browser sends the technical details every website receives, such as your IP address, the page you asked for and your browser type. The site uses them to send you the page and does not keep them (the visit count below keeps only what is described there). Like most websites, the server the site runs on may keep short-lived technical logs for security and troubleshooting; they are not used to identify or profile visitors.

Pages reach you through Cloudflare, which shields the site from attacks and keeps it fast, and most recipe photos are delivered by Bunny.net’s content delivery network. Like any web host, they see your IP address and browser details when your browser fetches a page or photo, use them only to deliver it and keep it secure, and do not receive anything else from this site.

The site does not use outside analytics or advertising services, and it does not embed anything from other companies: no videos, maps, social media posts or like buttons. The fonts are hosted here, so your browser never contacts a font service. The share buttons under recipes and posts are plain links, so nothing is sent to Pinterest, Facebook or X unless you click one. When you follow a link to another website, your browser only tells that site that you came from Cookin’, not which page you were reading.

Counting visits

To know which recipes people read and how they find the site, the site counts visits itself; nothing is sent to an analytics company. Once a page has loaded, your browser tells the site which page it was, the website that sent you there (if your browser shares it), any campaign tags in the link (such as utm_source), whether the link came from a Google or Microsoft ad (only which of the two, never the click code the ad adds to the link), your screen width and whether it is a touch screen. The site stores:

the page, the time and whether the page was found;
where the visit came from: the referring website’s name or address (for example google.com, never the page you were on there), the campaign tags and whether it was an ad;
your country, which Cloudflare works out from your IP address, and the kind of device, browser and operating system, worked out from your browser’s details, screen width and touch screen;
a visitor code that changes every day: a one-way hash of your IP address and browser details, mixed with a random value that is replaced at midnight and deleted with the first visit of the next day. That value is never included in backups. The code tells the site that several pages belong to one visit and how many people came each day. While the day’s random value exists, someone with access to the database could in principle match the code back to an address; once it is deleted, the code can no longer be linked to your address or to your visits on another day.

No cookie is set and nothing is saved in your browser for this. Your IP address and the full browser details are never stored. Search engine robots and other automated programs are not counted, and neither am I when I’m signed in. The counts are only visible to me in the admin area and are never shared or combined with anything else. If you’d rather not be counted at all, a content blocker that blocks the request leaves your visit out.

Cookies and local storage

Simply reading the site sets no cookies. These are the only ones it uses:

cookin_voter is set only when you rate a recipe. It holds a random identifier, nothing about you, so the site can remember your rating, let you change it and count one vote per browser. It can’t be read by scripts on the page, lasts one year and is renewed when you rate again.
cookin_session and cookin_device are set only when the site’s author signs in to the admin area; readers never receive them. The first expires after 30 days without use; the second remembers for a year that the browser has signed in before, so a stranger’s failed sign-in attempts cannot lock the author out. The author’s browser may also keep cookin-traffic-ignore in local storage, so their own visits are left out of the counts.
cookin-theme and cookin-units are not cookies but small settings saved in your browser’s local storage when you switch between the light and dark theme, or between metric and US measures on a recipe. They never leave your device.

None of these are used for tracking or advertising.

Comments

When you leave a comment, the site stores:

the name you enter, which is shown publicly with your comment;
your email address, if you give one: it’s optional, never shown publicly and only visible to me in the admin area;
your comment and the date it was posted;
your browser’s user-agent string and a keyed hash of your IP address, used only to fight spam and abuse.

Every comment is held for moderation and only appears once I’ve approved it. Spam is filtered by the site itself; comments are never sent to an outside spam-checking service. Your email address is not used for anything else and is never added to the newsletter unless you sign up yourself.

Star ratings

Ratings are anonymous. The site stores the rating, the recipe and a keyed hash of the random cookin_voter identifier described above, which is how it knows when you change your mind. So that one internet connection cannot flood a recipe with votes, a new rating also keeps a keyed one-way hash of your network address, never the address itself. No name or email is stored with a rating.

If you sign up for the newsletter, the site stores your email address, the date and time you signed up (your consent), the page and form you used, and a keyed hash of your IP address to stop the form being abused. Your address is used for one thing, sending the newsletter, and is never sold or shared.

Every newsletter email includes a link to unsubscribe in one click. When you unsubscribe, your address is marked as unsubscribed with the date, so you won’t be emailed again. If you sign up again later, that earlier date is kept next to your new sign-up. If you’d rather your address were deleted completely, just ask.

Spam and abuse protection

To protect the comment form, ratings, newsletter sign-up, sign-in page and the visit count, the site counts recent requests from each visitor for a short time (24 hours at most). These counters are keyed by a one-way hash of your IP address (for IPv6, of the /64 network it belongs to), never the address itself, and they expire automatically.

How long things are kept

Comments: for as long as they’re published, or until you ask me to remove them. Spam is deleted during moderation.
Ratings: for as long as the recipe is on the site.
Newsletter: until you unsubscribe. After that only your address and the date you left are kept, so you’re never emailed again, unless you ask me to delete them.
Abuse-prevention counters: from a few minutes up to 24 hours.
Visit counts: kept to follow how the site changes over time. The daily random value behind the visitor code is deleted with the first visit of the next day and never kept in backups; from then on, that day’s visits can’t be linked to an address or to another day.

Your rights, and how to reach me

You can ask to see, correct or delete anything the site holds about you: a comment, the email address you left with it, or your newsletter subscription. Email master@cookin.club and tell me which comment or address it’s about, and I’ll reply within 30 days. Because the site stores so little, the email address you used is usually all I need to find it. If you live in the UK or the EU, you also have the right to complain to your data protection authority.

Changes to this policy

If the site ever starts collecting something new, this page will be updated first, with a new date at the top.