Cookie Policy

In Short

What happens before you choose depends on where you are. In the EU, the UK and Switzerland, only strictly necessary cookies are set until you accept; everything else — analytics, advertising and chat — waits for your consent. Everywhere else, those cookies are used from your first visit unless you opt out, and the notice you see says so. In both cases you can change your mind at any time from the Cookie settings badge in the corner of any page.

We also honor Global Privacy Control. If your browser sends that signal, we treat it as an opt out of advertising cookies without your having to do anything else.

How to Control Cookies on ShortStack

There are three ways, and they work independently of each other.

Our cookie preferences

What the banner asks depends on where you are visiting from, because the law does. In the EU, the UK and Switzerland, a consent banner appears on your first visit, where you can accept all, decline all, or choose category by category, and nothing beyond strictly necessary cookies is set until you choose. Everywhere else, a notice appears instead: cookies are in use from the start, and Decline on that notice turns them off — which is also your opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information under US state privacy laws. In both cases, the Cookie settings badge in the corner of every page reopens the same panel, so you can change or withdraw your choices whenever you like. Changing your mind is as easy as the original choice.

Your choices are remembered for 180 days, after which we ask again.

Global Privacy Control

If your browser or a browser extension sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we process it as a valid request to opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information. In practice that means we deny advertising cookies and advertising identifiers for your visit. You do not need to interact with the banner for this to take effect.

Your browser settings

Every major browser lets you block or delete cookies for a site. This works regardless of anything on our side, but it is the bluntest of the three — blocking strictly necessary cookies will stop parts of the site working, including our record of the cookie choice you just made.

Chrome: Settings → Privacy and security → Third-party cookies. Firefox: Settings → Privacy & Security → Cookies and Site Data. Safari: Settings → Privacy. Edge: Settings → Cookies and site permissions.

The Four Categories

These are the categories shown in our cookie preferences, in the same words.

Strictly Necessary

Needed for the site to work: remembering your cookie choice, keeping you signed in, and protecting the site from automated abuse. These are set without consent because the site cannot function without them, and they cannot be switched off in our preferences panel.

If you block these: the site will not work correctly, and we cannot remember that you declined the other categories.

Performance

Help us understand which pages are used and where the site is slow or broken, so we can improve it. The data is used in aggregate to measure and improve the site, not to build a profile of you.

If you decline: nothing changes for you; we lose the ability to see which pages need work.

Targeting

Used for advertising: measuring which campaigns bring people to our site, and allowing our advertising partners to show you relevant ads elsewhere. This is the category to decline if you do not want your information shared with advertising partners. Declining it is a valid opt out of sharing under California and other US state privacy laws, and a Global Privacy Control signal declines it for you.

If you decline: you will still see ads, but they will not be informed by your visit here.

Functional

Power optional conveniences, principally live chat support and scheduling a demo. Set by us or by the third-party providers behind those features.

If you decline: live chat and demo scheduling will not load. You can still reach us at support@shortstack.com.

The Cookies We Set

The list below covers the cookies you are most likely to encounter. It is a summary, not the complete record — the authoritative, always-current list, including exact expiry for each cookie, is in the Cookie declaration tab of our cookie preferences panel, which is rescanned rather than written by hand.

Cookie	Set by	Purpose	Category
CookieScriptConsent CookieScriptConsentString	Cookie-Script	Records the cookie choices you made, so we do not ask again for 180 days	Strictly Necessary
__cf_bm	Cloudflare	Tells automated traffic apart from people, to protect the site from abuse	Strictly Necessary
_cfuvid	Cloudflare	Distinguishes visitors sharing one network address, for rate limiting	Functional
__zlcmid	Zendesk	Keeps your live chat conversation together across pages	Functional
ph_phc_…_posthog	PostHog	Product analytics — which features and pages are used. Set only while Performance cookies are permitted for you	Performance
_ga _ga_<property>	Google Analytics	Distinguishes visitors and sessions for traffic measurement. Classified as Targeting because the same Google account carries our advertising integration	Targeting
_gcl_au	Google Ads	Attributes a sign-up to the ad that brought you here	Targeting
test_cookie IDE	Google (DoubleClick)	Third-party advertising cookies used to measure and target ads across sites	Targeting
referral identifier	FirstPromoter	Credits a partner or affiliate who referred you. Set only while Targeting cookies are permitted for you	Targeting

We also use analytics that set no cookies at all. Plausible measures page views without cookies and without tracking anyone across sites, which is why it is not in the table and not in the preferences panel — there is nothing to consent to.

Third Parties Who Set Cookies

Each of these has its own privacy policy and its own cookie practices, and each appears on our subprocessors page:

Google — Analytics, Ads and DoubleClick, via Google Tag Manager
Cookie-Script — the consent banner itself
Cloudflare — security and traffic protection
Zendesk — live chat support
PostHog — product analytics
FirstPromoter — partner and affiliate referral tracking
Calendly — demo scheduling, loaded only while Functional cookies are permitted

What Happens When You Decline

Declining a category does two things. It stops the cookies in that category from being set, and it tells Google’s tags, through Google Consent Mode, that they do not have consent — so they do not read or write advertising or analytics identifiers for you. Tags that require consent do not fire at all.

One thing worth being straight about: with advertising consent denied, Google’s tags may still send a cookieless, redacted signal that a page was viewed. It carries no identifier for you and cannot be joined to a profile, but it is not literally nothing, and we would rather say so than imply a silence we do not deliver.

The same is true of our product analytics. Before you have made a choice, and where Performance cookies are not permitted for you, PostHog still receives page views and the calls that decide which version of a page you see, but it sets no cookie and stores no identifier in your browser, so those events cannot be tied to you from one visit to the next.

Consent and the Law

Under the EU and UK GDPR and the ePrivacy rules, we may set strictly necessary cookies without asking, and we need your consent for everything else. That consent is the lawful basis for our Performance, Targeting and Functional cookies, and you may withdraw it at any time from the cookie preferences panel, with no effect on anything done before you withdrew it.

Outside the EU, the UK and Switzerland we use a notice-and-opt-out model: cookies in the Performance, Targeting and Functional categories are set from your first visit, and you may opt out of any of them at any time. Under California’s CPRA and comparable US state laws, choosing Decline on the notice, declining the Targeting category, or sending a Global Privacy Control signal, is an opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information. Your wider rights — to know, to access, to correct, to delete, and not to be discriminated against for exercising them — are set out in our Privacy Policy.

Updates to This Policy

We update this policy when our use of cookies changes, and we change the “Last Updated” date above when we do. Because the cookie declaration in our preferences panel is rescanned automatically, it will always be at least as current as this page.

Have Questions?

Pancake Laboratories Inc. · 518 Pyramid Way, Sparks, Nevada 89431, USA

For questions about our use of cookies, contact us at support@shortstack.com.