Cookie Policy

Four things, all from BookArc itself. The first two are needed for the site to work at all; the last two are the ones you can refuse:

• Sign-in cookies. Set when you sign in, and the only reason you stay signed in from one page to the next. Without them you would have to sign in again on every click. They expire on their own, and signing out clears them.
• A parked idea. If you type an idea on the home page before you have an account, it is held in your browser’s session storage — not a cookie, and never sent anywhere — so that signing up does not lose what you just wrote. It disappears when you close the tab.
• One analytics cookie. Set by PostHog, which counts visits for us. It is what makes a second visit recognisable as the same browser, so we can tell twenty readers from one reader coming back twenty times. It holds a random id and nothing else — no name, no email, nothing you typed. Section 2 says what is recorded with it and how to refuse it.
• One cookie remembering where you arrived from. If you reach us from a search, a link on another site or a campaign we have tagged, that — and the page you landed on — is kept for six months, so that if you later make an account we know which of our own efforts brought you here. It holds no id and nothing about you, and it is written once on your first visit and never updated.

No advertising or retargeting pixels. No cross-site tracking. No ad network is given anything about you, and nothing here follows you off this site.

What the analytics cookie in section 1 records: the pages you open, the link or search that sent you, your browser, and a replay of how the page was used so we can see where people get stuck — with everything you type hidden, including book ideas, email addresses and passwords.

Both of those are cookies you can refuse and still use everything here. Visitors in the UK and Europe are asked first and nothing is stored or sent until they say yes. Anyone can refuse it at any time by blocking cookies for this site in their browser, or by turning on “Do Not Track”, which PostHog honours. Refusing changes nothing about how the site works.

• Polar, when you go through checkout. That happens on Polar’s own pages, under their cookie policy, and is what carries your basket through to payment.
• Google, if you use “Continue with Google”. Signing in happens on Google’s pages under Google’s policies.

The affiliate programme is not running yet. When it opens, arriving from a partner’s link will set one cookie recording which partner sent you, for 60 days, so their commission can be paid. It records the referral and nothing about you.

Until that programme is switched on, no such cookie is set by anything on this site.

Every browser lets you block or delete cookies, usually under privacy settings. Blocking ours will stop you being able to sign in, because being signed in is what they do. The rest of the site can be read perfectly well without an account.