Cookies & Tracking

This page is the complete inventory of what this Site stores in your browser and what it measures about visits — including the things most sites bury. The summary: no third-party trackers, no advertising, no cross-site anything, no consent-requiring cookies — and therefore no banner. What follows is the detail that backs that sentence up.

1. Definitions, so the rest is precise

• Cookie — a small file a site asks the browser to store and send back with every request to that site. Cookies can be first-party (set by the site you're on) or third-party (set by someone else's domain — the mechanism of cross-site tracking).
• Local storage / session storage — a space in your browser that a site can write to and read, which is never automatically transmitted anywhere. Session storage empties when the tab closes; local storage persists until cleared.
• Beacon — a small message a page sends to a server, here used to deliver our own measurement to our own address.

2. Cookies: for ordinary visitors, none

For an ordinary visitor to the public Site, the Site sets no cookies of its own — none. No advertising cookies, no third-party cookies, no social-media cookies, no analytics cookies. Loading the Site calls no font services, tag managers, ad networks, or social widgets: every asset is self-hosted on our own domain.

One infrastructure caveat, for completeness: the Site is delivered by Cloudflare. In rare situations — typically when its systems suspect automated abuse — Cloudflare may present a security challenge that uses a strictly necessary first-party cookie to tell humans from bots. That cookie exists solely to keep the Site available, does not track you across sites, and sits in the category consent laws exempt. We do not configure, read, or use it.

Bot protection on the forms. The register-interest forms use Cloudflare Turnstile, our infrastructure provider's privacy-preserving alternative to a CAPTCHA. When you register interest, a brief verification step appears on the form to confirm you are human; it sets no tracking cookie and no cross-site identifier, and it may present an interactive challenge if its systems suspect automated abuse. It is part of the infrastructure that serves the Site, not a third-party tracker, and we never use it to profile or follow you.

Owner device opt-out, for completeness. The Site operator can set a first-party cookie named annealir_nm (value 1) on their own devices, through a private, access-restricted owner panel, to mark visits from those devices as internal so they are excluded from the public-facing measurement figures. This cookie is never set on a visitor's device — it is only ever placed on the operator's own device, by the operator — and it has no effect on what any visitor sees, how their visit is measured, or any data collected from them.

Invited investors, for completeness. If you sign in to our invitation-only investor briefing, we set a single strictly-necessary, first-party session cookie (__Host-annealir_briefing) for the duration of your visit, so the area knows you are signed in. It is set only after you successfully sign in with an invitation, is read only by our own server on this domain, carries no tracking and no cross-site identifier, and sits in the category consent laws exempt. It is never set for an ordinary visitor to the public Site.

3. What we store in your browser

Entry	Type	What it does	Lifetime
annealir:intro	Session storage	Remembers the opening animation has played in this browser tab, so it plays only once per tab.	Until the tab closes
annealir:interest	Session storage	Failure-only outbox. Used only if a form submission cannot reach our server at the moment you send it — your entry is held here on your own device for the current browser session so nothing is lost, resent automatically within that session, and then removed. On a successful submission, nothing you typed is written here.	Until resent (then removed), or when the browser session ends
annealir:vid	Local storage	A random anonymous visitor identifier we generate — a random string tied to no name, email, or identity — so our measurement can count returning browsers without knowing who anyone is.	Until you clear site data
annealir:sid	Session storage	A random per-session identifier so pages viewed in one sitting can be grouped.	Until the tab closes
__Host-annealir_briefing	Cookie (first-party, strictly necessary)	Set only after an invited investor signs in to the private briefing area, so the area knows the visit is authenticated. HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Strict; carries no tracking and no cross-site identifier. Never set for ordinary visitors.	Until you sign out, or the session expires (a few hours)

None of these entries is readable by any other website, none contains personal details, and none is used for advertising or cross-site tracking of any kind. By default — and everywhere local law calls for a lighter touch, such as the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and other jurisdictions with comparable rules — we do not set the two measurement identifiers (annealir:vid and annealir:sid) at all; see Section 4.

4. What we measure, exactly

We run first-party measurement, built by us, served from our own domain, reporting only to our own endpoint (/api/beacon) on this domain, stored in our own analytics dataset. Per page view it records: the page; the referring page (if your browser sends one); browser language; time on the page and time it was actually visible; time spent on each titled section; deepest scroll point reached; counts of interactions (for example, that a share or register button was used — never what you typed); and viewport size and display scale. In standard regions it also records the anonymous identifiers described in Section 3.

At our server, from the network connection — never from your device — we additionally note coarse, network-level context of the kind any web server sees: the approximate location of the request (country, region, and city) and the organisation or network operator the connection belongs to (for example, a company or an internet provider). We record this in place of your IP address, which we deliberately do not store. It tells us, in aggregate, which regions and kinds of organisation are engaging with our work; it describes the network the request came from, not the person using it, and it is not an attempt to identify you.

Also at our server, we derive a coarse client family from the User-Agent header your browser sends to every web server: the approximate browser family, operating system, and device type (for example "Chrome", "iOS", "mobile"). Only the coarse family is stored; the full User-Agent string is not retained. This is not used for fingerprinting or cross-site tracking; it lets us see which broad categories of browser and device are in use so we can improve the Site for them. It is derived entirely server-side and sits within the same first-party, no-third-party, no-raw-IP posture as everything else measured here.

The following additional signals are also folded into the same single measurement — no new network requests, no third party, no personal data in any of them:

• Page performance / Core Web Vitals: standard browser-supplied timings — how long until the largest content element painted (LCP), first content painted (FCP), time to first byte (TTFB), first input delay (INP), and cumulative layout shift (CLS). Anonymous; no personal data; used only to measure and improve how fast the Site feels.
• JavaScript error count and first sanitised sample: the number of uncaught JS errors on the page, and a brief description of the first one (capped at 256 characters, stripped of any URL paths or values that could contain personal data). Used only to detect and fix bugs. No stack trace, no user data, no form content is captured.
• Interaction quality: rage clicks (count of rapid repeated clicks on an unresponsive element), dead clicks (count of clicks on elements with no action), and exit-intent (on mouse devices, a count of times the pointer left past the top edge of the window) — integers only. No record of which element, what text, the cursor path, or who clicked; only the counts.
• Time to first interaction: milliseconds from page load until the first click, tap, or keypress — one integer indicating whether the page felt ready in time. No record of what was clicked or typed.
• Connection type: the coarse network category your browser reports (for example "4g"). A single low-entropy string; not used for fingerprinting.
• Reduced-motion preference: a single 0 or 1 indicating whether your browser has requested reduced motion. Used only to understand how many visitors benefit from our reduced-motion adaptations; not used to identify you.
• Form interaction behaviour — field focus and abandonment only, never values: for each register-interest form, which fields were focused, which field was last active before the form was abandoned without submitting, the count of validation errors, and whether the form was submitted. Stored as a small JSON object. The values you type into any field are never captured, stored, or transmitted — under any circumstances. This record exists only to show us where forms are hard to complete.

All of the above signals are anonymous, collected by our own code, sent only to our own endpoint on this domain in the same beacon we already send, and subject to the same first-party, no-third-party, no-fingerprinting, GPC/DNT-off posture that governs everything else in this section.

Less is our default, not the exception. Our default posture is the privacy-maximising one: unless you are in one of a short list of regions where a fuller approach is clearly appropriate, we set and read no identifier on your device at all, we record no precise coordinates, and we keep the resulting records for a shorter period (Section 10 of the Privacy Policy). This minimised treatment applies automatically to every region with stringent data-protection or e-privacy laws — for example the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, among others — and to anywhere we are simply not certain. Measurement there is anonymous and entirely server-side.

What this measurement is for: understanding which parts of the Site are read, for how long, on what devices, and by which regions and kinds of organisation, so we improve it and understand interest ahead of deployment. What it is never for, and never does:

• no advertising, retargeting, or audience building;
• no selling, renting, or sharing of the data with anyone (it leaves our systems only under the narrow circumstances in the Privacy Policy, Section 8);
• no following you to or from any other website or app — it cannot: nothing we set is readable elsewhere, and we receive nothing from elsewhere;
• no fingerprinting — we do not probe your hardware, canvas, fonts, or installed anything to derive a covert identifier; in standard regions our identifier is a transparent random string, listed in Section 3, that you can delete in two clicks, and in stricter regions we set none;
• no identifying you as an individual — we never connect measurement to your name or email, including any submitted on a form; the organisation/network detail above describes the connection, not the person, and we make no attempt to single you out.

5. Why there is no cookie banner

Consent banners exist because most sites let dozens of third parties follow visitors across the web. We do not do that — there is no third party here, nothing follows you anywhere, and nothing we store needs consent under the law that applies to us. Our measurement is the kind privacy regulation treats most leniently: first-party, anonymous, non-invasive, fully disclosed, and switched off entirely for anyone whose browser signals a preference (Section 6). Interrupting every visitor with a banner to ask permission we do not need would be theatre. If our practices ever change in a way that genuinely requires consent, we will ask for it properly before the change takes effect — and this page will say so first.

6. Your controls

• Global Privacy Control / Do Not Track: if your browser sends either signal, our measurement does not run at all — no beacon, no identifiers. This is automatic; nothing to configure on our side.
• Clear site data: your browser's "clear browsing data" controls for this Site remove every entry in Section 3. Consequences: the opening animation may play once more; any not-yet-resent form entry waiting in the failure-only outbox is removed before it reaches us; our measurement counts you as a new anonymous browser.
• Block storage: the Site works with local storage blocked; you lose nothing but the conveniences above.
• Ask us: the rights in the Privacy Policy (access, deletion, objection) apply to measurement data too — hello@annealir.com.

7. Changes

Any change to what this page describes appears here first, with a new "Last updated" date. This page should be read with the Privacy Policy, the Terms of Use, and the Disclaimer.