Cookie notice

What a cookie actually is

A cookie is a short piece of text that a website asks your browser to keep and hand back on the next visit. That is the whole mechanism: it cannot read your files, see other sites you have open, or run anything on your computer. What makes cookies worth worrying about is not the technology but the use. An advertising network that sets the same cookie on ten thousand sites can follow one browser across all of them.

A first-party cookie is set by the site you are looking at. A third-party cookie is set by some other company whose code the site has loaded into the page — an ad network, an analytics service, a social widget. The tracking problem is almost entirely a third-party problem. This site has no third parties in it, and its one first-party cookie contains nothing about you.

The one cookie this site sets

That is the complete list, and we expect it to stay that way. The cookie is written by a small script in your browser rather than by our server, and only at the moment you press Accept or Decline — nothing is stored while you are simply reading. It is scoped to this domain and marked SameSite=Lax, so your browser will not attach it to requests coming from anywhere else. It holds no identifier, no random number, no name and no record of which pages you looked at. Two readers who both press Accept end up with a cookie that is character-for-character identical, which is another way of saying it cannot tell them apart.

What the Accept and Decline buttons do

Here is the part most cookie notices leave out. Both buttons store the same cookie. Accept stores the word accepted, Decline stores the word declined, and either way the message closes and stays closed for 180 days.

Declining does not switch any tracking off, because there is no tracking here to switch off. There is no analytics package waiting for consent, no advertising tag held back until you agree, and nothing on this site behaves differently depending on which button you press. The Decline button exists so that a reader who does not want to be treated as having consented to anything can say so and still get rid of the message.

What this site does not use

There are no analytics cookies here: no page-view counter, no session recorder, no heatmap, no tag manager. There are no advertising, remarketing or conversion cookies, and no advertising at all. There are no social network buttons or embedded posts, no video players, no comment system and no chat widget. There are no tracking pixels, no invisible counting images, and no attempt to fingerprint your browser. We do not use local storage or session storage to identify or count you either — the cookie is the only thing this site writes to your device.

There is one script on the site, pagekit.js, about a hundred lines long. It does three things: it opens and closes the menu on small screens, it shows and hides the cookie message, and it writes the current year into the footer. It sends nothing anywhere. Everything else is plain HTML and CSS, and every image and stylesheet is served from this domain.

The one request that leaves this site

The headings here are set in Cormorant Garamond and the body text in Karla. Rather than serving those font files ourselves, we request them from fonts.bunny.net. It is a font host: a service whose job is to store font files and hand them to browsers that ask, and nothing else. It is not an advertising network and not an analytics company.

Be clear about what that means for you. When you open a page here, your browser makes a request to that host, and any request to any server reveals the requesting IP address, the browser version and which page asked for the fonts. What does not happen is the part people usually mind: the font host sets no cookies, and we receive nothing back from it — no visitor counts, no reports, nothing. We chose it over the better-known alternatives precisely because it sets no cookies and needs no consent step of its own. If you block that request, as some privacy extensions do, the pages fall back to the default fonts on your device and every word stays readable.

How to see, block and clear cookies

Every browser lets you inspect and delete cookies, and none of it needs technical knowledge. The menus are named slightly differently in each, but the path is nearly always the same:

• To see what a site has stored: open your browser’s settings, find Privacy (or Privacy and security), then Cookies and site data, and choose the option to view all site data. Search for bridgettemorrissey.com and you will find the single entry described above.
• To delete just this site’s cookie: select that entry and remove it. Nothing is lost — there is no login to lose and no preference to reset. The only effect is that the message appears again next visit.
• To clear everything: look for Clear browsing data or Clear history and tick cookies. That clears cookies for every site, so it will sign you out of anything you are logged into elsewhere.
• To block cookies for this site only: most browsers let you add a site to a block list under the same settings. This site keeps working normally.
• To leave nothing behind: read the site in a private or incognito window. Cookies set in one are discarded when you close it.
• On a phone or tablet: the same settings live inside the browser app, under Settings and then Privacy, rather than in the device settings.

Why we show a banner at all

New Zealand has no cookie-banner law. The Privacy Act 2020 governs personal information, and a cookie storing the single word “declined”, which cannot be linked to any person, is not personal information. We could reasonably show nothing. We show the message anyway for one reason: something is being written to your device and you should be told. It also lets us say the useful part in one sentence — one cookie, no tracking — which is more than most banners manage in five hundred words and a wall of toggles. There is no hidden second layer where the real settings live.

Changes to this notice

If this site ever set another cookie, the table above would be updated before it was set, the message would change to describe it, and the date at the top of this page would move. We have no plan to add one: the site takes no advertising, sells nothing and has no reason to measure you, so the pressure that normally fills a page like this with third parties does not exist here.

For what happens to the details you send through the contact form, see the privacy notice; for the rules covering use of the site, see the terms of use. Anything unclear here is a fair question for privacy@bridgettemorrissey.com.