Cookie policy

1. What a cookie is, and why sites ask you about them

A cookie is a small piece of text a website asks your browser to keep and send back on every subsequent request. It lets a site, or a third party embedded in it, recognise your browser across pages and across visits. Related technologies — localStorage, sessionStorage, IndexedDB — do the same job through different mechanisms, and the law treats them the same way.

Under Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive (2002/58/EC, as amended by 2009/136/EC), storing information on a user's device, or gaining access to information already stored there, requires that user's prior informed consent. There are exactly two exceptions: storage carried out solely to transmit a communication, and storage strictly necessary to provide a service the user has explicitly requested.

2. What this site stores: nothing

We do not rely on either exception, because we do not store anything at all. Specifically, this site uses:

3. Why there is no consent banner

Because there is nothing to consent to. Consent under Article 5(3) ePrivacy is required for storing or accessing information on your device. We do neither. Asking you to agree to nothing would be theatre: it would train you to click “accept” without reading, it would add a cookie to remember your answer — creating the very storage the banner exists to authorise — and it would make this page less honest, not more.

If that ever changes — if we were ever to add a measurement tool, for instance — a real consent mechanism would appear before anything was stored, with a refuse option as prominent as the accept option, and this page would be rewritten first.

4. The one script on this site

There is a single JavaScript file, /js/cta.js, and you can read the whole thing. It does two things, both in your browser and both without storing anything:

• If the address of the page you are on already contains an advertising campaign parameter (for example msclkid or utm_source, which an ad platform adds when it sends you here), it copies that parameter onto the outgoing partner link so the retailer can attribute the click.
• It re-applies the rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" attribute to every partner link after modifying it, so the advertising disclosure cannot be lost at runtime.

It makes no network request, opens no connection, and calls no storage API. It does not run at all if you have JavaScript disabled, and the site works fine without it.

5. How to verify this yourself

Please do check. It takes about half a minute and you should not take a privacy claim on trust.

Chrome, Edge or Brave

1. Press F12 (or Ctrl+Shift+I; Cmd+Option+I on a Mac) to open DevTools.
2. Open the Application tab. In the left sidebar under Storage, click Cookies → https://veratis.online. The list is empty.
3. Still in that sidebar, check Local storage, Session storage and IndexedDB. All empty. Check Service workers: none registered.
4. Switch to the Network tab and reload the page with Ctrl+Shift+R. Sort by the Domain column: every single request is to veratis.online. Nothing is fetched from anywhere else.
5. Click the document request and look at the Response Headers. There is no Set-Cookie header.

Firefox

1. Press F12, open the Storage tab.
2. Cookies, Local Storage, Session Storage, Indexed DB — all empty for this domain.
3. In the Network tab, reload and check that the Domain column shows only veratis.online.

Safari

1. Enable the Develop menu: Safari → Settings → Advanced, tick Show features for web developers.
2. Develop → Show Web Inspector, then the Storage tab. Cookies, Local Storage, Session Storage and IndexedDB are all empty.

From a terminal, if you prefer

This command prints the response headers for the home page. There is no set-cookie line in the output:

curl -sS -I https://veratis.online/

6. What happens after you click a partner link

This is the honest limit of the promise above. Our promise covers veratis.online. It cannot cover someone else's website.

When you follow a link marked “partner link”, you leave this site for a vendor, retailer or affiliate network. Those sites very probably do set cookies, including for attribution and advertising, and they will ask you for consent under their own rules. We have no control over that and no access to what they collect. Read their cookie notice when you get there.

The link passes through /c/1/ on this domain, which is a plain forwarding page: it sets no cookie either, and it is excluded from search engines via robots.txt.

7. Managing cookies in general

Although this site gives you nothing to manage, your browser's settings let you block or delete cookies for every site. Look for “Cookies and site data” (Chrome, Edge), “Cookies and Site Data” under Privacy & Security (Firefox), or “Privacy” (Safari). Blocking all cookies will not affect anything on veratis.online.

8. Related pages

See the privacy policy for the server-log processing and your GDPR rights, and the editorial policy for why we took the zero-collection route despite being an advertising-funded publication.