Cookie Policy

This policy explains what this website stores on your device, who sets it, what it is for, and how to refuse or remove it. It covers www.cbcemea.com. Our Privacy Policy covers personal data more broadly.

CBC’s Brand Kit, our brand reference site, runs Vercel Analytics only and sets no cookies at all, so nothing in this policy applies there.

Your choice comes first

No analytics cookie is set on this site until you accept one.

Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity are not merely disabled before you choose — their scripts are never placed on the page at all, so there is nothing present that could set a cookie. This is a gate rather than a notice: a banner that starts tracking on load and offers a dismiss button would not be a choice.

You can change your decision at any time using the Cookie settings link at the bottom of any page. If you accept and later decline, the cookies those tools have already set are expired and the page reloads, because unloading the components alone would leave the scripts running until you next navigated.

The one cookie set whichever way you answer

cbcemea_consent records your decision — what you chose, when, and which tools you were asked about. It is strictly necessary: without it you would be asked again on every page, and a refusal would be impossible to honour.

It is set by our server rather than by a script in your browser, which is what lets it last. Safari deletes storage written by scripts after seven days, so a decision kept that way is quietly forgotten and you are asked again about once a week. This one lasts six months, after which we ask again.

It is never used to identify or track you, and it is not shared with anyone. Declining clears the analytics cookies below but keeps this one, because it is the record of the refusal.

Cookies this site sets only if you accept

Nothing listed here exists on your device before then.

• _ga — set by Google Analytics. Distinguishes one visitor from another.
• _ga_<id> — set by Google Analytics. Keeps the visit session going across pages.
• _clck — set by Microsoft Clarity. Holds a Clarity visitor ID for this site.
• _clsk — set by Microsoft Clarity. Joins several page views into one recorded session.

Declining clears all four.

We have deliberately not published expiry times here. Both providers set them, both can change them without telling us, and a figure printed on this page would quietly become wrong. The current values are in Google’s cookie usage reference and Microsoft’s Clarity cookie list, which are authoritative in a way this page cannot be.

Cookies the providers set on their own domains

Google and Microsoft also set cookies on domains they control — google.com, clarity.ms and bing.com — rather than on cbcemea.com. Microsoft’s published list names CLID, ANONCHK, MR, MUID and SM.

Being straightforward about the limit here matters more than sounding reassuring: these are outside this site’s reach. A website can only expire cookies on its own domain, so when you decline, we clear the four cookies listed above and cannot clear these. To remove them, use your browser’s cookie controls, or the providers’ own opt-outs — Google Analytics opt-out and Microsoft’s privacy dashboard.

They are only ever set if you accept in the first place, since neither script loads before that.

What we store that is not a cookie

One value lives in your browser’s local storage. It is not a cookie and is never sent to a server — the site’s own scripts read it in your browser, and nothing about it reaches us:

• theme — whether you chose the light or dark appearance.

Your cookie decision used to be kept here too. It is now the cbcemea_consent cookie described above, because storage written by a script is deleted by Safari after seven days and the decision did not survive.

Tools that set nothing

Vercel Analytics counts page views on every visit. It sets no cookie, stores nothing on your device, and cannot identify you — so there is nothing to consent to and it sits outside the gate. This is confirmed by observation, not only by its documentation: a visitor who declines ends the session with an empty cookie jar while the beacon still fires.

Ahrefs Site Audit crawls publicly available pages the way a search engine does, to monitor site health. It does not run in your browser and collects nothing about individual visitors.

Refusing cookies in your browser

Your browser can block or delete cookies independently of the choice you make here, and its setting wins. Blocking cookies entirely will not stop you using this site — nothing here depends on one.

The controls are under Settings in Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox.

Changes to this policy

If the tools on this site change, this page changes with it. The date at the top is when it was last revised.

Questions

Write to hello@cbcemea.com.