Cookie policy

What we use

PassResearch always uses a small set of strictly necessary cookies and browser local-storage values: the ones that keep you signed in, remember whether you prefer light, dark or your system's appearance, and stop a colour flash while a page loads. These carry no advertising and are never used to build a profile of you.

Two optional third-party services exist, and neither one loads until you explicitly allow it. Google Analytics 4 tells us which guides and pages are actually read and how the site performs. Google AdSense keeps the journal free to read by showing advertising. If you decline, neither service is loaded at all: no script, no request and no cookie from either of them. If you allow them, Google sets its own cookies and identifiers on our behalf, and Google's own privacy terms apply to what it does with them.

Where measurement is allowed it runs on public pages only: the marketing pages, the journal and the legal centre. Your workspace, drafts, sources, uploads, supervisor corrections, plan and account screens are never measured, and no address from those areas is ever sent anywhere.

The journal also keeps a readership record on our own servers — a count of which guides were opened and how many distinct readers opened them. It is part of the site's own database and is not shared with, or sent to, anyone else.

• A session cookie that keeps you signed in.
• A local-storage value that remembers your light, dark or system appearance choice.
• A short-lived preference used to render the correct brand colour in your browser's interface where the browser supports it.
• Your measurement choice itself, kept in your browser so you are asked once and not on every page — for up to six months.
• Only if you allow them: Google Analytics 4 cookies, and the cookies Google's advertising system sets. These come from Google rather than from us, and deleting your browser's site data clears them.
• A server-side readership record: one row per guide per day, holding only a one-way hash of a request address and browser user-agent — never the address itself — so a guide can be ranked without recording who read it.

Why we use them

The strictly necessary values each serve one specific purpose: keeping you authenticated, remembering your display preference, preventing a colour flash on load, and honouring the choice you made about measurement. The optional services have one narrow purpose of their own, and it is not to profile you: aggregate readership tells us which guides genuinely help students, and advertising pays for the journal to stay open to everyone. Neither is loaded unless you say yes.

We use no other third-party trackers, no cross-site advertising networks beyond Google's, and no data brokers.

Your control

The first time you open a public page you are asked once, in a small panel, whether measurement and advertising may run. Declining loads neither service. You can change that decision at any time with Cookie settings in the footer, and you are never asked on a page that holds your research.

You can clear cookies and site data in your browser at any time. Clearing the session cookie signs you out; clearing the theme value returns the site to following your system appearance.