Cookie Policy

Cookies in use

Essential cookies

One cookie, set only if you use AskZelda. It keeps consecutive questions from the same browser together and enforces the daily question limit. Kept for up to 30 days from your last AskZelda interaction. If you never use AskZelda, it is never set — the rest of the site works without it.

Your cookie choice

Not a cookie, but it is stored on your device: your answer to the banner is kept in your browser’s local storage, so we don’t ask again on every page. It records only the choice itself and is removed when you clear site data or use the Cookie settings link below.

Analytics cookies

Optional. Set only if you choose “Accept all” in the consent banner. We use Google Analytics to understand which content people find useful, measure engagement, and improve the site. We do not use cookies for advertising or cross-site tracking.

Measurement without cookies

Separately from the cookies above, we count page views using our own first-party measurement, and it runs for every visitor. It places nothing on your device, sets no cookie, and creates no visitor identifier of any kind, not even an encoded one. Your IP address and browser version are read to identify automated traffic and to resolve a country, then dropped without being written down.

What we keep is a daily tally: how many times a page was viewed, which sites referred visitors, which countries they came from, how many browser tabs began a visit, how much automated traffic we saw, and how often things like scrolling to the end of an article or following a link happened. Each of these is a separate running total with nothing joining it to the others, so a day's numbers cannot be reassembled into anyone's visit. They are aggregate counts that cannot be traced to a person or linked to your visit, so they are not personal data and we do not ask for consent to collect them. They are stored on our own infrastructure in the European Union and never shared with advertisers or used to follow you across sites.

Counting tabs lets us tell roughly how many visits a day's page views represent, rather than mistaking one person reading ten pages for ten people. It still cannot recognise you returning later, and it is not meant to: that would take an identifier we have chosen not to create.

This is also why our page-view numbers and our Google Analytics numbers differ: the tally above sees everyone, while Google Analytics only sees visitors who choose “Accept all”.

How to change your choice

You can withdraw or change consent at any time:

• Use the Cookie settings link below or in the footer to reopen the consent banner.
• Clear cookies and site data for zeldalabs.com in your browser settings.
• Most browsers also let you block third-party cookies entirely. See your browser’s help pages for instructions.

More information

For details on how we handle personal data more broadly, see the Privacy Policy. Questions? Email townsquare@zeldalabs.com.