Cookies

As at the date shown above, theprioryroom.com sets no cookies of its own. Not analytics cookies, not advertising cookies, not preference cookies, not a cookie to remember that you dismissed a banner. There’s no banner.

That’s unusual enough to be worth stating plainly rather than burying in a table of vendor names. Most clinic websites open with a consent dialogue because they have something to ask consent for. I do not.

Specifically, this site does not load any of the following:

• Google Analytics, or any other analytics or measurement script
• Meta, TikTok, Pinterest or LinkedIn advertising pixels
• Google Ads or any other conversion tag
• Heatmaps, scroll tracking or session recording
• Chat widgets, review widgets or social feed embeds
• Fonts, scripts or images loaded from a third-party network

I don’t know which pages you looked at, how long you stayed, or where you came from. I know how many people the site served in total, from the host’s own aggregate figures. That’s the extent of it.

Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, consent is required before storing anything on your device or reading anything from it, unless it’s strictly necessary to provide the service you asked for. Nothing here is stored and nothing is read, so there’s nothing to consent to. A banner asking for consent I don’t need would be theatre.

A cookie banner is also, on a phone, a large object sitting on top of the one button that matters. Not having one is a design decision as much as a legal one.

If you start filling in an enquiry or consultation form, your answers are held in your browser’s session storage while you work through it. A refresh or a mis-tap won’t lose what you’ve typed.

• It stays on your device. It’s not sent to me until you submit.
• It’s session storage, not local storage, so it’s erased when you close the tab. Nothing is left behind on a shared iPad.
• It’s cleared as soon as the form is submitted.
• There’s a visible control on the form to clear your answers immediately.

This is strictly necessary to provide the form you asked to use, so it doesn’t require consent. I’m telling you about it anyway.

Other people’s websites set their own cookies and I have no control over them. You leave this site when you:

• open the booking system (opens in a new tab), which is operated by Jane Software Inc.;
• follow a link to Instagram or another social account;
• open a map, a directions link, or any other link that takes you off theprioryroom.com.

At that point their cookie policy applies, not mine. Their links are plain links: nothing is preloaded, and nothing from those services runs on this site while you’re reading it.

Embedded third-party content usually sets cookies the moment the page loads, before you’ve done anything. A map, a video player, a booking widget. That’s how most sites accidentally end up needing consent.

The policy on this site is that no such embed loads on arrival. If a page ever needs one, it’ll appear as a still placeholder with a button. Nothing is requested from the third party until you press it.

Nothing on this site requires you to do anything. For the rest of the web, every browser lets you see, block and delete cookies from its privacy or settings menu. And every browser has a private or incognito mode that discards them when you close the window.

If you want an independent explanation of what cookies are and how to manage them, the Information Commissioner’s Office publishes one at ico.org.uk.

I might one day decide I need measurement. Running a business without knowing whether a page works is its own problem. If I do, three things happen before a single script loads.

1. This page is rewritten first, with the date changed.
2. A consent request appears, with reject as easy to press as accept and no pre-ticked boxes.
3. Nothing non-essential runs until you’ve said yes, and a decision to say no is remembered and respected.

I’d rather tell you that now, on the page that currently has good news on it, than quietly change the good news later.

What the site does with the information you do send me is set out in the privacy notice.