COOKIE POLICY

Cookies. All of them, listed.

Essentials run the site from your device. Analytics only with your yes. Embeds bring their own rules.

What cookies are

Small entries a site stores in your browser so it remembers something between visits. Ours live in local storage, work the same way, and are listed below — all of them.

What we store (first-party, on your device)

jolt-consentYour cookie choice from the banner. Kept 12 months, then we ask again.jolt-themeLights on or off.jolt-decide-tutWhether you’ve seen the Play or Skip tutorial.jolt-decide-sessionYour current Play or Skip picks, so the list survives a detour into a review.jolt-decide-statsYour all-time play/skip count. Stays with your browser.jolt-newsletterThat you subscribed, so we don’t nag.jolt-geoYour city and time zone, so the site opens in daylight or in darkness to match. Lives for one browsing session and is gone when you close the tab.

None of these leave your device. Deleting them logs you out of nothing — there are no accounts.

Counting visits, without a cookie

We want to know how many people read a piece, and we would rather know it about everyone than about the fraction who click a button. So the count runs on Vercel Web Analytics, which writes nothing to your device: no cookie, no local storage, nothing to delete. A visit is a hash our host makes of the request and throws away after 24 hours, and all we ever see is totals — pages, countries, referrers, phone or desktop.

There is no consent button for it because there is nothing stored on your machine to consent to, and nothing that could point back at you. If you would rather not be in the totals at all, write to privacy@joltmagazine.com and we will exclude you.

Google Analytics (only if you say yes)

_gaTells one browser from another so a return visit is not counted twice. 2 years._ga_YZYF4THD4DKeeps the current session together. 2 years.

Set only after "Accept all". Until then nothing is requested from Google at all: no script, no ping, no address logged. "Essentials only" means no Google, and choosing it later switches Google off and deletes the two cookies above.

What it adds is depth on the readers who agreed to it. No cross-site tracking, no advertising signals, no profiles, nothing sold.

Third parties

Music embeds (Spotify, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Apple previews) and social embeds (Instagram, X, YouTube) may set their own cookies when they load. Their policies apply to those.

Your choice

Pick in the banner, change your mind anytime via "Cookie settings" in the footer, or clear this site’s data in your browser. The site keeps working either way.

Change your cookie choice →LAST UPDATED: AUG 24 2026