Cookie Policy

This page lists what gets stored in your browser when you read The iBulletin, who put it there, and how to get rid of it. It exists because we carry advertising, and advertising is the part of a news site that stores things. Last updated: August 2026.

What is actually being stored

A cookie is a small file a site asks your browser to keep, holding a name, a value and an expiry date. Ours mostly hold something dull, such as the fact that you answered the consent banner. Local storage does the same job with no expiry, sitting there until you clear it. A tracking pixel is different, a tiny image whose loading tells a server that a page or an email was opened, storing nothing on your device at all.

We treat all of it as one question, whether something is reading or writing to your browser, because consent should cover the technique and not the file format. Advertising partners also use identifiers that are not strictly cookies, and your choice in the consent manager covers those too.

The categories we set

There are four, and only the first runs before you have answered anything. If you never touch the banner, the site behaves as though you refused, which costs us money and is the correct default.

Strictly necessary storage cannot be switched off, and it is worth knowing how little it is. It remembers your consent choice, keeps the site standing under load, and helps our delivery layer block abuse. None of it follows you off this site.

Strictly necessary. Your consent record, security and load-balancing values, and a flag noting the banner was answered. Set without consent, because without them the site cannot do what you asked.
Preferences. Choices you made, such as light or dark, text size, or the region you want sport results for. Written only when you change something.
Analytics. Our provider’s storage, counting which bulletins were read, where readers came from, and whether a page broke. Set only after consent.
Advertising. Set by our ad server and the programmatic exchanges, for frequency capping, measurement, fraud detection and personalisation. Set only after consent, and used to personalise only where you agreed to that.

Who else sets one

Besides us, storage can come from our analytics provider, our ad server, the programmatic exchanges and the demand partners behind them, our email provider when you click a link in the bulletin, our delivery provider, and the host of anything embedded in a story. We describe them by category rather than by brand because the exchange list changes and a stale list would be worse than an honest description.

Partners must comply with the law that applies to you and honour the consent choice we pass on through the industry framework the exchanges read, and the rules they accept are on our advertising page. What we cannot do is follow the data once a bid request has left the page. We can drop a partner and we cannot audit one.

Personalised and non-personalised advertising

With advertising consent, an exchange may use an identifier and what it already knows to choose a creative for you and measure whether you saw it. Without consent, advertising is chosen from context, meaning the page you are on and a rough idea of your country, with no identifier stored to target you.

Non-personalised inventory pays a publisher noticeably less, so a refusal costs us. We serve it anyway and we do not nag, because a banner that argues with you is not asking. One side effect is worth knowing: frequency capping is a job advertising storage does, so without it you may see the same creative more often.

Changing your mind, and doing it in the browser

The consent manager opens from the cookie settings link in the footer of every page. Change any category at any time, in either direction. Withdrawal takes effect on the next page load and we clear what we can. Where a partner has already written a value and offers no removal route, clearing your browser storage is the way to be rid of it.

Every major browser can also block third-party cookies outright, clear everything on exit, or block one site and leave the rest alone, under a privacy heading in its settings. One honest catch: our record of your consent is itself a cookie, so if you clear everything the banner treats you as new and asks again. Beyond the browser, the industry runs its own opt outs:

YourAdChoices, run by the Digital Advertising Alliance, for readers in the United States.
The Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page, covering its member networks.
Your Online Choices, the equivalent for the UK and Europe.
The advertising settings page inside your account with the large platforms whose tags appear on sites like ours.
Global Privacy Control, which some browsers and extensions send automatically. We honour it.

Those tools mostly work by writing another cookie, so clearing your cookies also clears the opt out. An old flaw in the design of the whole system, and not one either of us can fix from here.

How long things last, and where this sits

Session values die when you close the tab. Our consent record lasts about six months, after which we ask again rather than assume. Preferences last about a year, analytics storage no more than fourteen months. Advertising values run one to three months for capping and up to about thirteen months for measurement, though those are the partner’s durations and not ours.