Cookie policy

01The short version

This site sets two cookies of its own, both of them dull: one remembers that you are signed in, the other remembers which city you chose. Neither follows you anywhere. Google Analytics sets a couple more so we can see which pages people arrive on.

There is no advertising cookie on this site and no tracker sold to anybody.

02Ours

gd_session — set only when you sign in, and it is what keeps you signed in. It holds a random token and nothing else; the matching record on our side is a hash, so the cookie cannot be reconstructed from our database. It expires after 30 days, or immediately when you sign out. It is marked HttpOnly and SameSite=Lax, so no script on the page can read it and it is not sent along with requests from other sites.

city — set when you pick a city in the header, so the home page shows that city instead of asking again on every visit. It holds a city name such as “bengaluru”. It lasts a year and is not tied to any account.

03Google's

We use Google Analytics 4 to see which pages people arrive on and roughly where they came from — which search, which city, mobile or desktop. It tells us that a page is working, not who you are.

It sets these:

• _ga — distinguishes one browser from another. Lasts two years.
• _ga_51R485Z327 — keeps the state of a visit for our specific property. Lasts two years.

Google processes this data as described in its own privacy policy. We have not enabled Google Signals, advertising features or data sharing for advertising purposes on this property.

04Refusing them

Every browser can block or delete cookies, usually under Settings → Privacy. Blocking the analytics cookies costs you nothing: the site works identically without them, and we simply do not see the visit.

Blocking cookies from this site altogether also works, with one consequence — signing in stops working, because staying signed in is exactly what the session cookie is for.

Google publishes a browser add-on that turns off Google Analytics on every site at once, if you would rather do it in one place than per browser.

05Why there is no consent banner

We are telling you this plainly instead. The two cookies we set ourselves are the ones the site needs to do the thing you asked it to do, and the analytics cookies collect no advertising data and are attached to no ad network.

If that changes — if this site ever carries advertising or shares data with an ad platform — a banner is the least it would owe you, and this paragraph will be the first thing to go.