Cookie policy

1. The short answer

This website is a static, informational site. There is no login, no basket, no personalisation and no advertising, so there is almost nothing for it to remember about you.

By default it stores exactly one thing, and only after you have made a choice: a record of whether you accepted or declined analytics. Until you choose, nothing is written.

If you decline, no measurement script is loaded at all. It is not loaded and then switched off — it is never requested, and the page behaves identically.

2. Cookies and "similar technologies"

Strictly, the one item this site stores is not a cookie: it is written to your browser's local storage. The distinction is technical and the effect on you is the same — something is kept on your device — so we treat both under this policy rather than using the difference as a way to say we set no cookies.

The item is named "cookie-consent" and holds a single value representing your decision. It contains no identifier for you, it is not transmitted to us with page requests, and it is readable only by this website, only in the browser where it was created.

Because it lives in local storage rather than as a cookie, it has no expiry of its own. It stays until you clear site data for this domain, remove it through your browser's controls, or use the method in section 5.

• Name: cookie-consent — type: browser local storage — purpose: records your decision and stops the banner repeating — duration: until you clear it
• Analytics script: requested only after an explicit acceptance, never before

3. What analytics would and would not do

Where analytics is enabled on this site it is a privacy-focused measurement script whose purpose is to count visits and show which pages are read, in aggregate.

We treat this as a question for you rather than a technical necessity for a simple reason: we do not need it to serve you a page. It helps us decide which of these explanations are worth expanding. That benefit is ours, so the choice should be yours.

It is not used to identify you, to follow you across other sites, or to build an advertising profile. This site runs no advertising cookies, no remarketing pixels, no social network tracking scripts and no third-party embeds that set identifiers, and no visit data is shared with advertising networks.

4. Third parties, and why there are none

There is no video player, no map iframe, no chat widget, no comment system and no social button on these pages. Each of those loads code from another company's domain and, in most cases, lets that company set its own identifier on your device before you have interacted with anything.

The typefaces are served from this domain rather than from a font network, so requesting a page does not disclose your visit to a third-party font service.

Outbound links to standards bodies and regulators appear where they support a specific statement in an article. Once you follow one, that site's own cookie and privacy practices apply and ours stop; where the destination matters to you, its policy is worth a look.

One consequence worth stating on a payments site: because there is no third-party script on these pages, there is no route by which a compromised advertising or analytics vendor could inject something into them. Keeping the surface small is a security decision as much as a privacy one.

5. Changing or withdrawing your choice

You can change your mind at any time, and it takes effect for anything loaded after that point.

The simplest route is your browser's site-data controls: clearing stored data for visioncardservices.com removes the consent record, and the banner will appear again on your next visit so you can choose afresh. On most desktop browsers this sits under privacy or site settings; on most mobile browsers, behind the padlock or site-information control in the address bar.

You can also configure your browser to block or delete cookies and local storage generally, or to clear them on closing. Because nothing here depends on stored data, blocking it will not stop you reading any page — the banner will simply appear on each visit, because the record of your previous answer has been removed.

If you accepted and then withdraw consent, reload the page after clearing the record. The analytics script is injected at page load, so a reload is what guarantees it is not present.

6. The banner itself

The consent banner appears once, on your first visit, and does not reappear until the record of your answer is removed. It does not block the page behind it, and both options are given the same prominence — an "accept" that is a filled button next to a "decline" rendered as faint grey text is a design that answers for you.

Declining costs you nothing. No page is withheld, no feature is degraded and no second prompt appears later asking you to reconsider. If a site makes declining more work than accepting, the consent it collects is not worth much, and the practice is increasingly treated that way by regulators.

The banner links to this page rather than to a summary of it, because the point of linking is that you can read what you are agreeing to before you agree.

7. Keeping this page true

This policy describes the configuration of this website on the date at its head. If a component is added that stores anything on your device, this page is updated at the same time and the consent mechanism is extended to cover it before deployment, not afterwards.

A cookie policy that is written once and never revisited is worse than none, because it tells people something confident and wrong. When the site changes, this page changes with it.

Questions about anything here, including a request for detail about a specific item stored on your device, go to info@visioncardservices.com and are answered in writing.