Policy
Cookie Policy
Every cookie this site sets or allows, what each one is for, how long it lasts, and how to refuse the ones that are optional.
A cookie is a small piece of text a site asks your browser to keep and send back on your next request. Two other kinds of browser storage do much the same job, and both are treated as cookies on this page, because the distinction matters to programmers and not to readers: local storage and session storage.
The short version: the only cookies here are the ones needed to serve the site. There is no analytics tag, no advertising, and no third-party script of any kind on these pages — so nothing follows you to another site, nothing builds a profile of you, and nothing is shared with anyone.
Strictly necessary
These cannot be switched off, and under both the GDPR and the ePrivacy rules they do not require consent: without them the site cannot be delivered securely. None of them is used to measure anything, and none of them is readable by anyone but this server.
| Name | Purpose | Lasts |
|---|---|---|
gettechbyte-session |
Identifies your session so a single request can be tied to the one before it. On the public pages it holds nothing but the anti-forgery token; it is marked HttpOnly, so no script can read it, and SameSite, so it is not sent from other sites. | 120 minutes |
Kept in your browser, never sent
These are local storage rather than cookies, which means they are never attached to a request and this server never sees them. They exist purely so the site behaves the way you left it.
| Name | Purpose | Lasts |
|---|---|---|
theme |
Whether you chose the light or the dark theme. Absent until you press the toggle. | Until you clear it |
cookie-notice |
That you have answered the cookie notice, so it stops reappearing on every page. | Until you clear it, or until the notice changes |
analytics-optout |
Written only if you press Reject. It is what stops your page views being counted, and it is checked before anything is sent — so while it is there, nothing about your visit is recorded at all. | Until you clear it |
The site’s own analytics use no cookie at all
GetTechByte counts page views itself, on this server, and it is worth being precise about what that does and does not involve. It sets no cookie. It reads nothing off your device. It runs no third-party script. It recognises a run of requests as one visit by hashing your IP address and browser string together with a secret key held only on this server — a pseudonym that cannot be reversed, is never shared, and is deleted along with everything else after 400 days.
That is also why the notice at the corner of the page offers no switches — there is nothing on your device for you to turn off. The Privacy Policy sets out what is recorded and why.
Videos
Where a post embeds a YouTube video, the player is loaded from
youtube-nocookie.com, which stores nothing until you press play. If you do press play,
YouTube may then set its own cookies under
Google’s privacy policy.
Scrolling past a video sets nothing.
The notice, and what Reject does
The panel in the corner of the page is a notice rather than a consent request: nothing here is waiting on your permission, and the cookies listed above cannot be switched off — one is needed to serve the page, the other never leaves your browser.
Reject is not decoration, though. It refuses the one thing on this site that can be refused: being counted. Press it and nothing about your visit is recorded — not a page view, not a referrer, not the pseudonym described above. The check happens in your browser before anything is sent, and no second mechanism picks the visit up instead.
You are under no obligation to press it and the site is under no obligation to offer it: the counting sets no cookie and identifies nobody, so it needs no consent under either the GDPR or the DPDP Act. It is offered because a Reject button that refused nothing would be a lie told politely. to change your mind either way — the same link is in the footer of every page.
If this site ever loads something that genuinely needs permission, this notice is replaced by a real consent dialog and you will be asked afresh. Having dismissed a notice will never be counted as agreement to something that did not exist when you dismissed it — the two are stored under different keys precisely so that confusion is impossible rather than unlikely.
Refusing cookies in your browser
Everything above can also be blocked at the browser level, which is the more thorough option because it applies to every site rather than this one: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge.
Blocking the strictly necessary cookies is allowed and mostly harmless here — you can read every page without them. Blocking local storage means the site forgets your theme, and shows the cookie notice on every visit, since it has nowhere to remember that you have read it.
Questions
If something on this page does not match what you find in your browser, that is a bug in the page and worth reporting: info@gettechbyte.com. The Privacy Policy covers everything that is not a cookie.