Legal

Cookie Policy

Exactly what HeatCheck stores in your browser — which is very little, all of it essential, and none of it used to track you.

Effective September 4, 2026

1. What this covers

“Cookies” here means cookies and the other ways a site can store something in your browser — chiefly local storage, which is what HeatCheck uses for most of it. This policy lists every one of them.

It sits alongside our Privacy Policy, which covers personal information generally.

2. Why there is no cookie banner

You have probably noticed that this site never asked you to accept anything. That is not an oversight, and it is not us cutting a corner — it is the consequence of a decision about what we measure.

HeatCheck stores nothing in your browser that is not needed to do the thing you asked for. There are no advertising cookies, no analytics cookies, no tracking pixels and no third-party tag manager. Our measurement is deliberately cookieless — see How we measure the site below. With nothing optional to store, there is nothing to ask your permission for.

What would change this

If we ever add something that stores data in your browser for analytics, advertising or session recording, we will ask first, with a real choice and an easy way to change your mind — and this page will say so before it happens, not after.

3. Essential storage

This is the complete list. Each one is needed to sign you in, to make voting work, or to remember a choice you already made. None is used for advertising, none is shared with anyone, and none can be read by another site.

sb-… (cookies) Session · set on sign-in: Your sign-in session, set by our authentication provider. Only present once you have an account and are signed in. Removing them signs you out.
interestometer_voter_token Local storage · until cleared: A random identifier so one person's vote counts once, even with several tabs open. Created the first time you open a show page. Not linked to any account, and not readable by any other site.
heatcheck-color-mode Local storage · until cleared: Whether you chose the light or dark theme. Set only if you change it from the default.
__stripe_mid, __stripe_sid Cookies · 1 year / 30 minutes: Set by Stripe on pages with a payment form, to detect fraud. Present only if you visit checkout or billing.

Local storage is not a cookie

Most of the list above is local storage rather than cookies, which matters in one practical way: it is never sent to our servers with a request. It stays in your browser until something clears it, and “Clear site data” in your browser removes all of it at once.

4. How we measure the site

We do want to know which pages are worth keeping and whether the site is fast on a real phone. We get that from two Vercel products, and neither one sets a cookie or stores anything in your browser.

Vercel Web Analytics No cookies · no browser storage: Counts page views and visitors per page. A visitor is identified by a hash of the incoming request that is discarded and regenerated every 24 hours, so you cannot be followed from one day to the next, or from this site to any other. It records the page, where you arrived from, your country, and your browser and device type — never your name, your IP address as we hold it, or anything tied to your account.
Vercel Speed Insights No cookies · no browser storage: Measures how quickly pages become usable, from real visits. It exists so we can find out that a page is fast on our machines and slow on a mid-range phone at a venue.

Both report aggregate figures only. Because neither stores anything on your device and neither can identify you, they run without asking — there is no cookie to refuse.

What we deliberately do not use

No Google Analytics, and no Google Tag Manager. We tried this route and chose against it: it needs cookies, which needs a consent banner, which means only measuring the visitors who agree to be measured.
No advertising or remarketing pixels — no Meta pixel, no Google Ads tag, no LinkedIn Insight tag.
No session recording or heatmaps. Nothing replays what you did on a page.
No cross-site tracking of any kind, and no sale or sharing of data with anyone who does it.

5. Embedded video and chat

There is one exception to all of the above, and it is worth being plain about. A host can put their live YouTube video and chat on their show page. When they have, the page loads an embedded player from youtube.com, and Google may set its own cookies when that player loads — for playback preferences and, if you are signed in to Google, potentially for personalisation on Google’s side.

Those cookies are Google’s, not ours; we cannot read them and we do not receive what they collect. They appear only on show pages where the host has switched video or chat on, and never on this site’s marketing pages, the guide or the dashboard.

6. Controlling storage yourself

Your browser has the final say over all of it:

Block or delete cookies for a site from its settings — usually under Privacy, or from the padlock in the address bar.
“Clear site data” removes cookies and local storage together. On HeatCheck that signs you out and discards your anonymous voting identifier.
Private or incognito windows discard everything when you close them.

Blocking everything has a cost

Everything HeatCheck stores is essential, so blocking it has real consequences: you cannot stay signed in, and your votes may be counted more than once or not at all. There is no optional category to switch off, because there is nothing optional stored.

7. Changes and contact

If we add or remove something that stores data in your browser, we update this page and the “Last updated” date on it. Anything non-essential would mean asking your permission first, as described above.

Questions go to support@heatcheck.io.

The other documents

Also

Acceptable Use Policy