Cookie Policy

1. What a cookie is, and what this site actually uses

A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to keep, so that the next page, or the next visit, can be told something the last one knew. Browsers hold other things in much the same way, local storage among them, and the difference between the two matters far less to a reader than what is being kept and who can read it, so this page covers both and calls each of them by its own name.

This site sets no cookies of its own. Two things it does keep in your browser without asking, and neither is a cookie: the record of the answer you give to the bar, and a note that the assistant’s invitation has been seen. Both are set out in section 3. Cookies appear here only if you accept analytics, and when they do they are Google’s rather than ours.

2. Nothing that measures runs until you say yes

The bar asks once. Accept and decline are the same control twice, the same size in the same frame, each one click, in the order they are read, because a decline made quieter than an accept is the reason cookie bars are distrusted and it would be the wrong thing to do to anybody, let alone to somebody arriving here in a hard week. Declining is a decision rather than a deferral: it is stored the way an acceptance is, it is honoured for as long as it stands, and nothing on this site behaves differently afterwards.

Until you accept, the analytics in section 4 has not loaded. It is not sitting there idling behind a flag, and it is not queued: the script is fetched from Google at the moment consent is given and at no moment before it, which is the whole reason the question is asked rather than assumed. If you decline, nothing is fetched, and the only thing written down is the fact that you declined.

3. Everything that is stored, and how long it lasts

Five keys, and there is no sixth. The first two are set whatever you answer, the third only once you have closed the assistant’s invitation or opened the assistant, and the last two exist only if you accepted. Each name below is written exactly as it appears in your browser, so that you can go and look.

• etm.cookie-consent · ours, in local storageWritten the moment you answer, either way. It holds three things and nothing else: which of the two you chose, the date and time you chose it, and a version number for the notice you were answering. It stays on your own device, it is never sent to us or to anybody else, and it lasts until you change your answer or clear your browser data. It is why the question is asked once instead of on every page, and it is our evidence that it was asked at all. If the notice ever changes in a way that deserves a fresh answer, the version number moves and an older record counts as no record, so the bar returns rather than an old yes being quietly reused for a new question. In a private window, or in a browser set to block site storage, the answer is held in memory for the length of the visit only and you are asked again next time.
• etm-concierge-nudged · ours, in local storageWritten the moment you close the assistant’s first-visit invitation, the small note that appears beside the button in the corner after about twelve seconds, or the moment you open the assistant at all. It holds the character 1, and its whole job is to keep that invitation from reappearing on every page you read afterwards, which is the single most disliked thing a website does. It is never sent anywhere, it measures nothing and it identifies nobody, and it lasts until you clear your browser data, after which the invitation appears once more and no more. The conversation you have with the assistant is not written to your browser at all: it lives in the page while the page is open, and reloading loses it.
• _ga · Google’s, a cookieSet only after you accept. A random identifier that lets Google tell one browser from another, so that four pages read in one sitting are counted as one visit rather than four strangers. Google sets it and Google decides its life, which by default is two years and is refreshed each time you come back.
• _ga_Z7GB251QPK · Google’s, a cookieSet only after you accept. The same job for this site’s own analytics property, whose identifier is in the name: it holds the state of the visit in progress, so that a session which pauses and picks up again is not counted twice. Its default life is also two years.

That is the complete list. There are no advertising cookies and no conversion pixels, no session recording and no heat maps, no embedded video player and no social buttons. The assistant in the corner is our own rather than a chat company’s widget, it loads nothing from anybody else into the page, and the one thing it keeps in your browser is the note above; where what you type into it goes is section 8. The typefaces are served from this site’s own servers rather than requested from a font company while you read, so opening a page here does not tell a font company that you did.

4. What the analytics sees, and what it is not allowed to do

Once you accept, Google Analytics 4 loads from googletagmanager.com and reports to the practice’s own property. What it builds is a picture of how the site is read: which pages, in what order, how long each one was open, the site or the search that brought you, an approximate location worked out from your network address, and the sort of device, browser, operating system and screen you are reading on. Google’s own enhanced measurement adds a handful of events on top of that, the ones worth naming being how far down a page you scrolled, clicks that took you off the site, and file downloads.

What it is not allowed to do is the part of this page most worth reading. The configuration switches off Google signals and ad personalisation signals, which are the two settings that would otherwise let Google put what your visit here tells it to work somewhere else: to gather you into an advertising audience, to tune an ad to you, or to recognize you on another site as somebody who reads this one. Both are off, on purpose, and they are off in the code that loads the script rather than in an account setting that could be changed without anyone noticing. That is the difference between measuring how a website is read and feeding what somebody read into an advertising machine, and this practice is on the near side of it.

Your network address is not something we ever see. Google uses it to work out a rough location, at the level of a city rather than a street, and then discards it, and nothing in the reports names a person or could be turned back into one by us. What we look at is whether people find the training page and whether they get as far as the questions.

Google is a company in the United States, it holds what it collects on its own servers under its own terms, and how long it keeps it is a retention setting on the analytics account rather than something this website decides. If that matters to you, ask us and we will tell you what it is set to.

5. Global Privacy Control

Some browsers, and some extensions, send a Global Privacy Control signal with every request. It is a standing instruction not to sell or share personal information, and California expects it to be treated as one rather than as a preference to be weighed.

We treat it as a decision already made. If your browser sends it, the analytics in section 4 does not load, and it does not load whether or not you ever see the bar or answer it. There is no persuading step in between, and answering the bar is not something you have to do in order to be left alone.

6. Changing your answer

Your answer is yours to change at any time, in either direction, and it costs one click. This brings the bar back with both answers on it:

Change your cookie choice

Accepting turns measurement on from that point. Declining removes the record of an acceptance and stops anything further being asked to run, and here is the honest description of what that does not do: a script cannot be pulled back out of a page that has already drawn, so what stops is everything from the next page onward rather than the last five minutes. Google’s two cookies also stay in your browser until they expire or you clear them, which is what section 7 is for.

If the button does nothing, the page’s scripts have not run, in which case section 7 is the route that does not depend on us at all.

7. Doing it from your browser instead

None of this has to go through us. Every current browser can block or delete cookies and site data, either for one site or for all of them, and doing it here clears both Google’s cookies and our record of your answer, which means the bar asks again on your next visit. Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge each keep the controls under privacy or site settings, and each of them explains its own better than a paragraph here could. A private or incognito window discards the lot when you close it.

A browser set to refuse storage altogether does not break this site. The bar copes with it, your answer is held for the visit and forgotten afterwards, the assistant’s invitation may appear once more than it otherwise would, and nothing else on this site needs to remember you.

8. Things that are not cookies and still reach a company

Five things reach somebody else without a cookie being involved, and although this is a cookie page they belong on it, because a reader asking about cookies is really asking who learns that they were here.

What you type into the assistant goes to our own server and from there to Anthropic, whose Claude model writes the reply. It travels from our server rather than from your browser, so Anthropic receives the conversation and our instructions to the assistant, and not your network address or your browser details. Nothing happens until you choose to type, and nothing about it is a cookie. What is sent, what is checked for before anything is sent, and what we may keep, is section 4 of the Privacy Policy.

The pictures from the ranch’s own Instagram account are fetched by our server with a token that never reaches your browser, so Instagram is not told who is reading the page. The photographs themselves, though, are drawn straight from Meta’s image servers as the page loads, which means Meta receives your network address and your browser details in the course of sending them, the same way it would if you opened one of the pictures in a tab of its own.

The join button on the Members Day page goes to our own server, which asks Stripe to open a checkout page and then sends you to it, on Stripe’s domain. Nothing from Stripe is loaded into this site, no card is typed here, and nothing about the payment comes back; what Stripe does with what you type on its page is Stripe’s privacy policy to answer, and section 8 of the Privacy Policy says what ours sends.

The documentary on the About page is hosted by Vimeo, and it does not load with the page. What the page draws is one of our own photographs; Vimeo is reached only if you press play, and the player is asked not to track you when you do, which is their own setting for it, so no Vimeo cookie is set. They do receive your network address in the course of sending you the film.

The site is hosted by Vercel, and like any web host its servers keep operational logs: the address a request came from, the page asked for, the time, and the browser reported. Those exist so that a site can be served, kept up and defended.

None of those is governed by your answer to the bar, because none is optional in the way a measurement script is, and all four are set out more fully in the Privacy Policy.

9. Why we are particular about this one

Some of the people who read these pages are in the middle of a loss, or are looking for help on behalf of somebody they love. A page opened at two in the morning is not a shopping signal, and it should not follow anybody around afterwards. That is why the two advertising switches in section 4 are turned off rather than left at their defaults, why the decline button is the same size as the accept button, and why section 3 names five keys instead of describing a category of them.

If you would rather nothing at all were counted, decline. Beyond the ordinary server logs any web host keeps, nothing then is.

10. When this page changes

If anything new is added to this site that runs in your browser, it is written up here in the same change that adds it and the date at the top moves. Where the addition deserves a fresh answer rather than an old one, the version number on the notice moves too, and the bar comes back and asks, because an answer given to one question is not an answer to a different one.

11. Contact

Questions about this page, or about anything above that you would like made plainer, are welcome at hello@equinetherapymalibu.com or (310) 709-8618. Equine Therapy Malibu at Shakti Ranch, Santa Monica Mountains, Malibu, California.