What the site remembers

Nothing here follows you

The short version is the whole version. StitchMood sets no advertising cookie, no measurement cookie and nothing belonging to anybody else. It cannot count you, it cannot tell you apart from your neighbour, and it does not know whether you have been here before. What it does is leave four short notes in your own browser so the porch is roughly the way you left it, and those notes stay on your machine — they are not attached to the requests that fetch these pages, so the server never sees one.

The little bar along the bottom of the screen says the word “cookies” because that is the word people know. Strictly, not one of these four is a cookie. They are local storage: the same cupboard, a quieter drawer, and one your browser empties on the same command.

The four notes, by name

The bottom two only come into existence once you sit down with an actual pattern and start ticking; read a page without touching the tracker and they are never written at all. None of the four holds a name, an address, an account or anything that could be traced back to a person, because the porch does not have any of those things to put in them.

Why Accept and Decline do the same thing today

Here is the honest bit, and it is the reason this page is short. A consent bar is supposed to switch something off. On this site there is nothing to switch: no measurement, no advertising, no pixel, no embedded player, no social button that reports home. So both buttons write the same kind of note and the site behaves identically either way. The only thing pressing either one changes is that the bar stops asking.

Decline is kept there on purpose rather than quietly removed, because the day something IS switched on, that button has to already mean something. What it will mean is set out at the bottom of this page.

Clearing them, or refusing them outright

Every browser can throw local storage away, usually under Settings, then Privacy, then something about site data. Clear it for StitchMood and all four notes go at once; there is no copy anywhere else to restore them from. You can also block storage for this site entirely, and every page still works — you simply lose the small comforts: the round tracker forgets which round you were on, the larger text drops back to normal on the next page, and the bar at the bottom asks again each visit.

Nothing is held back behind accepting. There is no pattern, no page and no part of a page that appears only for a reader who said yes.

The one request that leaves the porch

Every word, photograph, stylesheet and script on these pages comes from StitchMood's own server. One request does not: the typefaces are fetched from Google Fonts, which is a font host and, in the course of serving a file, sees the ordinary details any web request carries. It sets nothing in your browser on our behalf and is told nothing about you. If you would rather it did not happen, blocking that host leaves the site perfectly readable in your own default face.

An email address typed into the porch-letter box is different in kind: it does go to the porch's server, because a letter cannot be posted otherwise. It is not written into your browser, and the privacy page says exactly what happens to it and how to be taken off the list.

If a day comes when there is something to decline

If StitchMood ever takes on measurement, advertising or anything else that watches, this page is rewritten before that thing is switched on, not after. It will name each cookie, who sets it, roughly how long it lasts and what it is for, and the date at the top will move so you can see it has changed. From that day Decline stops being a formality and starts keeping those cookies off your machine, and the privacy page carries the same undertaking. If any of that is unclear, write to Marlene at hello@stitchmood.com.