Cookies

Two different things with one popular name

A cookie travels. Your browser attaches it to every request it sends a site, so the site can recognise the machine on the other end. Local storage does not travel: what is written stays on the machine it was written on until something on that machine deletes it, and no request ever carries it anywhere.

Crochet Addiction has no use for the travelling kind and sets none — not one, not for a session, not for a visit. Everything below is local storage. The banner along the bottom of a fresh visit still says the word “cookies”, and that is a deliberate choice: it is the word a reader recognises, and calling it something more accurate would only make it easier to skim past.

The four entries, verbatim

These are the literal keys. Open your browser's developer tools, look under local storage for this domain, and you will find these and nothing else.

• crochetaddiction_cookie_consent — one word, either accepted or declined, recorded the moment you answer the banner so the banner stops appearing. It is read back for exactly one purpose: deciding whether to draw the banner again. Since the press runs nothing that consent could gate, the two buttons genuinely do the same work today, and the leaf says so rather than implying a choice that is not there. It persists until you clear this site's data.
• crochetaddiction_text_size — one word, written when you press A or A+ in the running head, so that a larger face carries across to the next leaf instead of resetting. It persists until you clear this site's data.
• crochetaddiction_plate_progress_ with a plate's address appended — one entry per plate you tick rounds off on, holding the round numbers you have ticked and nothing more. It is what puts you back on round 7 when you come back to a square you left half worked. Nothing here is written today: the book holds no plates yet, so this entry cannot exist until Volume I is set.
• crochetaddiction_plate_done_ with a plate's address appended — the value 1, written when you close the small note that appears after the last round of a plate is ticked, so that note is shown once and not again. Also dormant until there are plates.

None of these four is transmitted. The press's server receives no copy, cannot read them, and has no record that they exist. The first two are written whatever you answer on the banner, because a note that only records a preference you set yourself is what the law calls strictly necessary — refusing to remember your own answer would mean asking you the same question on every leaf.

An address in the next-leaf box is a different matter

Typing an email into the next-leaf form does send something: it goes to the press's own server and is held in a small database there, which is a subject the privacy leaf covers properly. Nothing about that address is kept in your browser afterwards, and none of the four entries above is connected to it.

The list of what is not here

Written out plainly, because the absences are the point: no analytics of any make, no advertising network, no retargeting or conversion pixel, no share buttons that phone their platform, no comment or chat widget, no embedded video, no A/B testing tool, no heat map, no session replay, no fingerprinting, no data broker, no consent-management vendor.

Exactly one class of request goes anywhere but the press's own server, and it is the type: a stylesheet from fonts.googleapis.com and the font files it names from fonts.gstatic.com. Fetching them sets no cookie, and Google is not told who you are — but a request has to come from somewhere, so Google can see the network address it came from and which font was wanted. Self-hosting the four faces would end even that, and it is on the bench.

Sweeping them away

Any browser will do it. The command sits under Settings, then Privacy or Site settings; clear this site's data and all four entries go, along with the banner's memory of your answer. You can also switch local storage off entirely for Crochet Addiction, or read the whole book in a private window that discards it when the window closes. Nothing breaks either way: the leaves render, the plates read the same, and the only losses are the two conveniences described above — the text size resets, and ticked rounds are not remembered.

Declining on the banner costs you nothing today either, for the reason given above. When that stops being true, it will stop quietly being true.

The undertaking, if any of this changes

Nothing described here is switched on without this leaf being reset first, and reset before the change goes live rather than after it. Any new entry — cookie or otherwise — is listed here by its exact name, with who sets it, how long it survives, and what it does. On that same day Decline acquires teeth: it becomes the answer that keeps the new thing switched off, and the banner is rewritten to say so. The date printed at the head of this leaf is how you check when it was last true. The privacy leaf repeats the same promise from the other end, and neither is worth more than the press's willingness to keep it.