Cookie Policy

This page lists what A Time To Shop stores on your device, what each item is for, and how to get rid of it. “Cookie” here covers cookies and the equivalent browser storage technologies, because from your point of view they do the same thing.

Essential

These are needed for the site to load and to stay usable. They cannot be switched off from here.

• Network and security, set by Cloudflare, which serves this site. These distinguish real visitors from automated traffic and keep the site available under attack. They are not used to advertise to you.
• Cloudflare Turnstile, on our signup form only. It checks that a submission is not automated. It replaces a CAPTCHA and does not profile you across sites.
• Your privacy preference, stored in your browser under atts_consent_v1. This exists so we do not ask you the same question on every visit. It stays on your device and is not sent to us.

Analytics

We measure traffic with Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, Microsoft Clarity, loaded through a tag manager container. This tells us which pages are read and where readers arrive from. We do not use it to build an advertising profile about you, and we do not sell what it collects.

Microsoft Clarity does more than count visits, so it deserves its own sentence. It records a playback of the session: pointer movement, clicks, scrolling and the pages you moved through, which we use to find layout and usability problems. It is configured to mask text you type, so form fields including your email address should not appear in a recording, but you should treat any session-recording tool as capable of capturing what is on screen. If that is not acceptable to you, block it using the controls below before browsing.

These load only if you allow the analytics category in our privacy preferences.

Advertising and affiliate

We set no advertising cookies of our own, and no advertising tag runs on this site.Two related things do happen, and they are worth being precise about:

• Our referral tracking does not use a cookie. When you click one of our outbound product links, the link passes through our own domain, we generate a random click identifier, and we add it to the destination address. The identifier travels in the URL. Nothing is written to your browser to make that work. What we record at that moment is listed in our privacy policy.
• The merchant you land on will set its own cookies. Affiliate networks and retailers use a cookie on their own domain to remember that we referred you, typically for a fixed window, so that a later purchase is credited to us. That cookie is theirs, set after you have left this site, and governed by their policy. We cannot see it, set it or delete it.
• If you arrive from one of our Microsoft Advertising ads, the ad platform adds a click identifier to the URL. We record it so we can tell which ads work. That is a URL parameter, not a cookie we set.
• When you click one of our outbound product links we also record an affiliate_click event in our own analytics, so we can see which recommendations readers find useful. The link passes through our own domain, so this is a first-party event about a page interaction. It is separate from the referral tracking above and does not add a cookie.

How to control all of this

• Use the privacy preferences control on this site, reachable from the footer, to set the analytics and advertising categories.
• Every major browser can block or delete cookies, either for all sites or for one. Look for cookies or site data in your browser's privacy settings. Blocking essential cookies may stop the signup form from working.
• Private or incognito browsing discards cookies when you close the window.
• To avoid affiliate cookies entirely, do not use our outbound product links. The articles read the same either way, and we would rather you read them than not.
• To stop the sharing that affiliate click tracking can amount to, see Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information.

Changes and questions

If the set of cookies on this site changes, this page changes with it and the “last updated” date above moves. Questions go to filone@atimetoshop.com.