Cookies

Your answer

The answer itself is kept in your browser’s local storage, not in a cookie, so declining leaves nothing that travels with a request. Clearing site data for this domain resets it, and you will be asked again.

What is counted either way

Every page view is counted, whatever you answer. The counter is sent the path of the page and nothing else — no address, no browser string, no cookie, no identifier — so the total for a page can be read, but no view can be joined to any other view or to a person. That is what the most explored list on the front page is built from, and it is why it cannot tell you anything about who read what.

What agreeing adds

Agreeing loads Google Analytics 4. It writes two cookies in your browser, _ga and one named for the property, which hold a randomly generated client identifier; that identifier, the page address and your approximate location derived from your IP address are sent to Google, who process it as our data processor and under their own terms. The identifier lets Google report that one visitor read three pages rather than three visitors reading one each, which is the whole of what it is for here.

Declining after agreeing expires those cookies. If any survive — a cookie set on a domain the site cannot guess at, for instance — clearing site data for this domain in your browser removes them.

What the site never does

• No advertising, and no cookie for it. Nothing on this site is sold, and no advertising network is loaded.
• No accounts, so nothing to sign in to and no cookie holding who you are.
• No sharing of what you read with anyone but Google, and only then if you agreed.
• No figure on the site changes according to what you have answered. The statistics are the same either way.

What the site does with the figures themselves, rather than with you, is in about.