There is no
cookie banner

Three things, and only these:

ibc_member

A cookie, set only when you log in. It is what keeps you logged in. Strictly necessary, so it needs no consent — and deleting it simply logs you out.

ibc-reader

A random id, written the first time you log a page. It stops the drop-off chart counting you twice. It is not linked to your email address and holds nothing about you.

ibc-page, ibc-voted

The page you last logged and which quotations you have seconded, so the site does not forget between visits. Written only when you do those things.

All three are first-party: they are read only by this site, never sent anywhere else, and none of them can follow you to another website. Nothing is written before you act — visiting and reading puts nothing on your device at all.

No Google Analytics. No Meta pixel. No advertising or retargeting tags. No session-replay tools. No third-party cookies of any kind, from anybody.

We do not know how many of you there are, which pages you liked, or where you came from. It is occasionally frustrating and it is the right trade.

Because it is a different question, governed by a different rule, and the distinction is the whole reason this page exists.

Cookie rules — the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations — are about storing or reading information on your device. Your IP address is not stored on your device. It arrives with your request and is written down on our side, once, when you sign up, so we can show that a real person asked to join and spot anybody hammering the form.

That is ordinary data processing under UK GDPR. It needs a lawful basis and it needs telling you about, which is what the privacy notice does. It does not need a banner, and a banner would not give you any control over it. We delete it after twelve months.

Your browser can clear all of it, any time, without asking us — usually under Settings, then Privacy, then site data. Clearing it logs you out and makes the site forget which page you had reached. Nothing else breaks.

There is no “manage preferences” panel here because there is nothing in it to switch off. Switching off the login cookie would just be logging out.

The moment we add anything that is not strictly necessary — an analytics script, most obviously — this page stops being true and a real consent mechanism becomes mandatory. If that day comes you will be asked properly, before anything is set, and this page will say so first.