Cookies and local storage

Strictly necessary

These are set regardless of your choice, because the site cannot work without them.

• __session and __client_uat — set by Clerk, our authentication provider. They keep you signed in. Without them you would have to enter a code on every page. Session cookie and one year respectively.
• pf_consent — remembers which button you pressed on the cookie banner, so we do not ask again. A first-party cookie, one year. It has to be a cookie rather than browser storage so our server knows whether to render the banner at all. Ironically, refusing this one would mean being asked forever.

Analytics — only if you accept

If you accept, we store four things and use them to understand which pages are worth writing more of. Two are first-party and never leave our own systems. The other two belong to FlowGlance, a separate analytics service on its own domain. We built FlowGlance and we run it, but it is still a different service receiving your page views, so we name it here rather than filing it under “first-party” on a technicality.

• pf.sid — a random identifier in sessionStorage that groups your page views into one visit. Deleted the moment you close the tab. Not linked to your identity unless you are signed in.
• pf.attrib — remembers the page you first landed on and where you came from, for 30 days. This is how we find out whether anything we write brings people here.
• _fw_vid— FlowGlance’s visitor identifier, in localStorage. It is what lets us tell a returning reader from a new one. It has no expiry date of its own; choosing “Essential only” below deletes it.
• _fw_sid and _fw_la— FlowGlance’s session identifier and last-activity timestamp, in sessionStorage. A visit ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.

FlowGlance receives which pages you opened, what you clicked, how far you scrolled, which sections you actually read, and whether the page threw an error. It sets no cookies and never receives your IP address. We have switched off its ability to record the text you copy, to capture what you type into forms, and to attach your email address to any of it — those are off at the server, so the data is dropped on arrival rather than merely hidden from us.

We do not run Google Analytics, Meta pixels, advertising tags, heatmaps or session recording. Nothing here is sold, shared with a data broker, or used to build a profile that follows you off this site. FlowGlance is the only service outside our own servers that sees your behaviour, it only ever runs after you press “Accept”, and everything it records is listed above.

Ours, not yours

• pf_internal — set only when we deliberately visit a special URL, so our own testing does not pollute the statistics. It will never be set on your browser by normal use.

Change your answer

You can also clear site data in your browser at any time, which removes everything above. Signing out clears the Clerk cookies.

More detail

The privacy policy covers what we store on our own servers, which processors are involved, and how long everything is kept.