Cookie policy

A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to keep and send back on the next visit. The same rules apply to anything that works the same way, so this policy also covers local storage, session storage and similar browser-side storage. Where we say "cookies" below, we mean all of it.

Cookies fall into four categories. Only the first can be set without asking you.

• Strictly necessary — needed for the site to work or to remember a choice you made. No consent required, because without them the thing you asked for cannot happen.
• Functional — remember preferences that improve the experience but are not essential.
• Analytics — tell us how the site is used.
• Marketing — build a picture of you across sites for advertising.

The consent record is stored as a first-party cookie with SameSite=Lax and the Secure flag. It contains the policy version it was given against, the timestamp, and one true/false value per category. It contains no identifier for you, and it is never sent anywhere.

A stored choice is tied to the version of this policy that was current when you made it. If the categories change, the old record stops counting and we ask again rather than assuming your previous answer still applies.

The consent mechanism on this site is complete: granular per-category controls, choices stored and honoured, and refusing exactly as easy as accepting — same button, same size, same prominence, no pre-ticked boxes and nothing hidden a layer down.

It only appears when there is something to consent to. With no analytics or marketing provider configured, there is no non-essential cookie to ask about, and a banner in that situation would be asking you to agree to nothing. That is not caution, it is theatre — and it makes people click through the dialogs that do matter.

If that changes, this page changes with it, the banner appears, and nothing non-essential is loaded until you have said yes.

Withdrawing consent is as easy as giving it. The cookie settings link in the footer reopens the same controls at any time, and any change takes effect immediately.

We also honour Global Privacy Control (opens in a new tab). If your browser sends that signal, we treat it as a refusal of every non-essential category without asking you again.

Your browser can block or delete cookies for any site, including this one. Blocking the consent cookie means we cannot remember your choice, so you would be asked again on your next visit — which is the browser working as intended, not a fault.

Non-essential scripts are not loaded and then disabled — they are never added to the page at all until consent exists. A script that has loaded has already made its request, already seen your IP address and already had the chance to set storage; disabling it afterwards is too late to matter.

How we handle personal data generally is in the privacy policy. For anything not answered here, write to contact@littlestone.world.

Adding any cookie means updating the table above, raising the policy version, and asking again for any consent already given. The "last updated" date moves whenever the content does — that is checked automatically before the site can be built.