Cookie Policy

What a cookie actually is

A cookie is a small text file a site asks your browser to keep, so that the next request your browser makes carries something the site can recognise. Ours mostly hold a random string. On their own they say nothing about you, and joined to enough other records by companies that do that for a living, they can say a great deal.

Two relatives of the cookie do similar work and are treated the same way here. Local storage keeps values in the browser without attaching them to every request, and we use it to remember your consent choice and your dark mode preference. Pixels, sometimes called tags, are tiny invisible files whose only purpose is to be requested, which tells a server that a page or an advertisement loaded. Your consent covers these too.

The four kinds we use

Everything set on this site falls into one of four buckets, and only the first one is exempt from asking you first. We keep the count at four deliberately, because a category list long enough to be impressive is usually a category list nobody has audited.

Strictly necessary. Load balancing, security and abuse protection, and remembering that you already answered the banner. These run without consent because the site cannot be served without them.
Preferences. Light or dark, text size, notices you already dismissed. Losing these breaks nothing except your patience.
Analytics. Counting readers and pages, seeing whether anybody reached the end of a long district story, telling a real surge during a red alert from a script.
Advertising. Set by the ad server and the exchanges filling our display inventory. They cap how often you see the same creative, measure whether it was viewable, detect click fraud, and where you have consented, select advertisements from a profile built elsewhere.

The advertising bucket pays for the reporting and is the only one we would drop tomorrow if the money worked another way, which our ownership and funding page says too.

Who else sets cookies here

We set very few ourselves. The bulk come from third parties, by category: the delivery network that gets pages to a reader on a weak signal in Wayanad, our analytics provider, the ad server and the programmatic exchanges bidding into our inventory with their own downstream partners, the newsletter service, and occasionally an embedded video or map inside a story.

We will not print a vendor list in prose, because ours changes and a stale list published confidently is worse than none. The consent manager holds the current one, with the companies by name, what each says it does and the legal basis it claims. If a name in there worries you, refuse that vendor and read the site anyway.

Personalised advertising, and what changes if you say no

With your consent, the exchanges may use an identifier to select advertisements based on what has been inferred about you across other sites and apps. Refuse, and we serve contextual advertising instead: creative chosen by what the page is about and roughly where in the world the request came from, with no profile involved. A story about Onam fares gets travel advertising because of the story, not because of you.

Refusing costs you nothing here. No article is withheld, no counter starts running, and the banner does not come back three paragraphs later dressed as something else. It does cost us money, since non-personalised inventory pays less, and we would rather say so than hide the trade behind a pre-ticked box. Advertisers are told the same thing, which our advertise page sets out.

Changing your answer, whenever you like

Your consent is not a door that locks behind you. The consent manager reopens from the footer link on every page, shows what you chose last time, and lets you switch any category or any single vendor on or off. A withdrawal takes effect on the next page you load. Readers in California will find the Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information control in the same place, and we honour the Global Privacy Control signal.

Browser controls sit underneath all of that and outrank us. Every current browser can block third-party cookies, clear what is stored for a site, or refuse cookies entirely, usually under a privacy or site settings menu, and private browsing windows discard the lot when you close them. Blocking everything will break the memory of your consent choice, which means the banner will greet you every visit, an irony we have not found a way around.

The industry also runs its own opt-out pages, which cover many advertising companies at once rather than only this site. The Digital Advertising Alliance runs youradchoices.com, the Network Advertising Initiative runs optout.networkadvertising.org, European readers have youronlinechoices.eu, and if Google’s advertising products appear in the vendor list for your session, adssettings.google.com turns off personalisation across everything it serves. Those pages set their own opt-out cookies, so clearing your cookies wipes the opt-out along with everything else.

How long they last, and what to read next

Session cookies die when you close the browser. Our consent record is kept for up to six months and then we ask again, because a choice made a year ago is not a current answer. Preference values persist until you clear them, analytics identifiers are set for up to fourteen months, and advertising cookies run from a day to about two years depending on the vendor. The figure for each one is in the consent manager rather than here, where it would go stale.

What happens to the data once collected, who receives it and the rights you hold over it are in our privacy policy. Questions go to support@keralanews247.com with PRIVACY at the front of the subject line, and other routes to the desk are on our contact page.

If you are unsure what is running right now, open the consent manager and check before you take our word for it.