A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to keep. Some are needed for the site to remember a decision you made; others follow what you read. This page lists every cookie Touchline can set, what each one is for, and how to change your mind at any time.
What we set
| Cookie | Set by | Purpose | Expires |
|---|---|---|---|
tl_consent |
Touchline | Remembers whether you allowed analytics cookies, so you are not asked again. | 6 months |
_ga |
Tells returning visits apart from new ones in Google Analytics. | 2 years | |
_ga_<id> |
Keeps the state of the current visit for Google Analytics. | 2 years |
tl_consent is the only one written without asking, and it is
written only once you have answered — it holds your answer and nothing else.
It carries no identifier, so it cannot be used to recognise you.
Google Analytics, only if you say yes
With your permission we use Google Analytics to understand which stories are read and where readers arrive from. It stores the two cookies above on your device and sends Google your visit, including your IP address, which Google may process outside the European Union under its own terms.
Until you accept, the Google script is never loaded: not deferred, not loaded in a limited mode — not requested at all. If you refuse, or simply never answer, no request ever leaves your browser towards Google. We do not use its advertising features, and advertising storage stays switched off even after you accept.
How we count readers without cookies
Whether or not you accept anything, we run our own page counter. It sets no cookie, stores nothing on your device, and reads nothing from it. When you open a page it sends us four things: the path of the page, the domain you arrived from (never the full address, which would reveal what you searched for), a rough screen size — small, medium or large — and whether your browser asks not to be tracked.
To tell one reader from another within a single day, that request is turned into a fingerprint of your IP address and browser, mixed with a secret that changes every night and is never kept. The next day the same reader is a different fingerprint, and nobody — including us — can work backwards from yesterday's. This is why the site has no cookie banner blocking the page, and why this policy is short.
Your choice
Currently: no choice made yet.
Refusing changes nothing about what you can read. You can come back to this page and switch at any time; if you refuse after having accepted, the Google cookies are deleted from your browser straight away.
You can also delete cookies, and block them entirely, from your browser's settings — usually under Privacy. Blocking them all is fine here: nothing on this site needs a cookie to work.
Questions
See our privacy page for what we do and do not collect.
Last updated 8 September 2026