Cookie Notice

Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, consent is required to store information on, or read information from, your device where that storage is not strictly necessary. Analytics cookies, advertising, personalisation. PALMA sets none of those. Its page counting stores nothing on your device and reads nothing from it, so there is nothing to consent to and no banner to dismiss.

This is not a loophole. It is a consequence of a decision made much earlier: PALMA has no advertising business, no growth-analytics practice and no third-party scripts. There is nothing following you around this site because nothing here was built to.

A visitor who never signs in is served no cookies at all. Reading the entire public archive, every honour, every creator, every season, requires nothing to be stored in your browser.

PALMA keeps a count of how many times each of its pages is opened. When a public page loads, it tells the server its own address, /paroh, say, and a number goes up by one. Terms typed into the Roll of Honour and the creator index are counted the same way, so that PALMA can see what people look for and do not find.

That is the whole of it. The request carries a page address and nothing else:

1. INo cookie is set, read, or needed. Counting works identically whether or not you are signed in, and nothing is stored in your browser.
2. IIYour IP address is not stored, not logged against the count, and not hashed into an identifier. Neither is your browser’s user-agent string.
3. IIINothing links one page view to another. PALMA cannot tell whether two views came from one person or two, on the same day or across a year.
4. IVNo profile is built, because there is nothing to build one from.

The consequence is deliberate, and PALMA would rather state it than be thought to be hiding it: PALMA cannot report unique visitors, returning visitors, or where its traffic came from. Every one of those requires telling one reader from another, which requires holding something that identifies you. PALMA holds nothing that identifies you, so it does not produce those figures, not as an oversight, but because producing them is the thing it declined to do.

Counts are kept as a total per page per day. There is no record of an individual visit anywhere in PALMA’s systems to be subpoenaed, breached, sold or handed over, because no such record is ever created.

1. INo third-party analytics. No Google Analytics, no Plausible, Fathom or any other hosted service, and no data about you leaving PALMA for anyone else to hold.
2. IINo advertising or conversion pixels. PALMA runs no advertising.
3. IIINo session recording, heatmaps or scroll tracking.
4. IVNo social embeds that set cookies. Links to a creator’s channels are ordinary links, and load nothing until you click them.
5. VNo fingerprinting, and no attempt to identify a device across sessions or within one.
6. VINo third-party fonts, scripts or tag managers. Everything the page loads is served from palmaawards.com.

Every browser lets you block or clear cookies and site data. Blocking PALMA’s will not degrade the public site in any way, the archive, the seasons, the categories and the nomination form all work without them.

Two things do break: you will not be able to stay signed in to a portal, and the site will forget your theme between visits. There is no way to sign in without a session cookie, because the session cookie is what being signed in means.

Write to concerns@palmaawards.com. The wider picture, what PALMA holds on a server rather than in your browser, and for how long, is in the privacy notice.