Cookie policy

A small file a website asks your browser to keep, and which your browser sends back on your next visit. It is how a site can tell that two requests came from the same browser without knowing who you are.

mappbook-visitor — the only cookie MappBook sets on a page an audience sees. It holds a random identifier and nothing else: no name, no address, no account, and nothing taken from any other site. It exists to answer one question — has this browser already been counted on this link — so that opening a link twice does not appear as two people.

• Contents: a randomly generated identifier, created by us, meaning nothing anywhere else.
• Lifetime: one year, then it expires and a new one is issued.
• Flags: HttpOnly, so no script on the page can read it, and SameSite=Lax, so it is not sent from other sites. On the live site it is also Secure.
• Scope: this site only. It is not shared with anyone, sold, or used to follow you elsewhere.

Sign-in cookies — if you create an account, our authentication provider (Clerk) sets cookies that keep you signed in. These are set only for signed-in creators. An audience answering a poll never has an account and never receives them.

We use a third-party analytics service (datafa.st) to count page views and understand which pages people reach. We do not use it to build a profile of you.

Anything that service stores is governed by its own policy rather than this one. If you block third-party scripts, the site works normally.

We advertise this product, and three networks — X, Google and Meta — measure whether somebody who saw one of those adverts went on to create an account. Their scripts set cookies of their own, and those cookies can be read by the same network on other sites. That is what they are for, and it is the whole of what they do here.

They never run on a creator’s page. Open a link somebody shared — a poll, or a bio page — and none of the three is loaded at all. Nobody answering a question is a prospect of ours, so an audience never meets an advertising cookie through us.

• No advertising or social-network script on any page a creator shares.
• No selling or sharing of anything a cookie holds.
• Nothing identifying you is sent to an advertising network in the clear: where we report a signup from our own server, the address is hashed first.

Every browser can delete existing cookies and refuse new ones, usually under Settings → Privacy. You can also open the site in a private window, which discards them when you close it.

Blocking mappbook-visitor does not stop you answering a poll. It means we cannot tell that you have already answered, so a link may offer you a question you have already given an answer to — and that answer will still be refused, because the rule is enforced in our database and not by the cookie.

If we add a cookie, it will be listed here before it ships, and the date at the top of this page will change.

Questions about any of this go to contact@mappbook.com.