Cookies and Privacy

TL,DR: If you’re concerned about privacy, block all the things.

Cookie – WikiPedia definition.

This site uses cookies to track things. Cookies are small files that are stored on your computer that contain information about you and your browsing session to steal your data, violate your privacy, curdle your milk, curve your spine, blah blah blah.

A lot of plugins and features use cookies to save your preferences and settings on your computer so you can have a personalized and smooth experience. Free services like Google Calendar and Facebook and Twitter are free to use, but they generate revenue in customer profiles and activity tracking that they sell to advertisers. So, when they use cookies, they might store more information than necessary to perform their function, and companies like Google, Facebook, WordPress, Twitter, and Tiktok don’t have the best track record for respecting privacy.

Additional tag code, such as Google Analytics, can track your behavior on a site, watching how long it takes you to scroll a page, what you click on, and your visitor journey. They report these events and allow a site owner to action based on those events, such as adding people to a mailing list when they request it or following up on an abandoned cart with a coupon for a discount.

We at Debauche, on the other hand, are usually too busy or blonde to read the reports these trackers and cookies generate. Say “cookie” and Lags will eat a bag of them. And we don’t have any e-commerce or other monetary transactions going on here, aside from the RFL campaigns which are entirely separate and handled by ACS/RFL.

The EU, California, and an increasing number of jurisdictions are ramping up their online privacy laws out there, so it’s only reasonable to try to follow the increasingly complex web of laws out there.

R. has tried to strip down this site’s cookie use to a bare minimum. The Cookie dialog box provides a report of all the cookies this site uses, deliberately and inadvertently. Here’s some explanations as to why we use some of them:

  • Google Analytics was used to track incoming search requests so we know which keywords best describe content on the site. It also helps with some testing for site performance and render times.
  • The video embeds ping YouTube with browser and bandwidth information, which ultimately ends up in the hands of Google.
  • WordPress/Jetpack statistics are used to track which countries our visitors come from so we know which languages to put in the translator widget. They also help with tracking issues with 404 Not Found. which y’all should be telling R. when you hit a missing page or dead link, but nobody ever does.
  • We used to use Monster Insights to track the effectiveness of ad campaigns, but Facebook ads were not effective at generating audiences.
  • Speaking of Facebook… we dumped that widget as well as the InstaGram widget.
  • Twitter? I have enough anger in my life.
  • When we post OpinionStage polls for the anniversary shows, there’s some cookie tracking there, mostly for keeping Jammal and Ava from voting a billion times.
  • R. also performs some A/B testing on the site design to see if slight tweaks in design or widgets help with performance, and cookies help with that.
  • The cPanel software collects some stats on traffic and pages people land on. R. just uses the WordPress JetPack stats.

As for the rest of it, we really aren’t watching anyone do anything. The sponsors on the sidebar aren’t paying per clickthrough or anything… it’s just value-added thank yous there for their continued support.

But if you’re still suspicious of Google and WordPress and others collecting data, then by all means DISABLE ALL OF THE COOKIES. Please. Be our guest. Do it now. (It’s what R. does.)

Anyway, that was a lot, but necessary.