Privacy Policy

The Short Version

• Google Analytics 4 counts page views under measurement ID G-HBSRF22BFP. It tells us which articles get read and roughly which country a reader is in. It does not tell us who you are.
• Google AdSense serves the display ads under publisher ID pub-3867781003356565. It is the only ad network on the site, and ads.txt names that publisher ID and nothing else.
• Google Fonts delivers the two typefaces this site is set in. Your browser fetches them from Google directly, so Google sees your IP address on every page load even if you block every cookie.
• Cloudflare sits in front of every request and handles caching and abuse filtering before the page reaches you.
• The contact form is the only place you hand us anything by choice. Nothing else on the site asks you to type.

There is no newsletter, no comment box, no login for readers, and no affiliate tracking anywhere on the site.

There is also no cookie consent banner, which means the analytics and advertising cookies load on your first page view rather than after you agree to them.

Who Runs This Site

KnowTheCheese is a small independent publication written and edited by Elise Whitfield. It runs on WordPress, and the site operates under the laws of Victoria, Australia.

Nobody here is a data broker. We sell no data, rent no lists, and hold no mailing list to sell.

The practical consequence is that almost every privacy question about this site is a question about Google, because Google supplies the analytics, the advertising, and the fonts.

What We Collect

Data reaches us in three ways: automatically through the tools loaded on every page, directly when you send a message, and through the server and network logs needed to keep the site online.

• Analytics data. Pages visited, time on page, referring site, device and browser type, and approximate region derived from your IP address. Google Analytics 4 collects this under measurement ID G-HBSRF22BFP. We read it as totals, and we cannot attach any of it to a name.
• Advertising data. Google and its advertising partners may set and read cookies, use web beacons, record IP addresses and device identifiers, and use your browsing history on this site and elsewhere to select, cap, measure and protect ads.
• Contact form submissions. The name, email address, subject and message you type into the form on the contact page. The form runs on Contact Form 7 and passes the message to email.
• Server and network logs. IP address, browser user agent, requested URL and timestamp, recorded by the web server and by Cloudflare to serve pages and block abuse.
• Checklist ticks. Some guides carry tick boxes. Your ticks are written to your own browser's local storage so the list survives a reload, and that data never leaves your device.

We collect no payment details, no government identification numbers, no health data, and no precise location.

We do not build reader profiles, and there is no account system that could hold one.

Cookies, Local Storage, and the Off Switch for Each

Four things store something in your browser when you read this site, and only two of them can be traced back to a company that profits from the data.

The table gives each one, what it holds, how long it lasts, and what actually turns it off.

The last row is the one people expect to be tracking and is not. Checklist ticks are written and read entirely inside your browser, and no request carries them anywhere.

Blocking the first two rows costs you nothing as a reader. Every article, table and image still loads, and the ads either disappear or become less relevant.

Advertising and Google AdSense

This site carries display ads served by Google AdSense, and Google chooses which ads you see rather than us.

Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this and other websites. Where personalisation is switched on, those ads draw on browsing history that has nothing to do with cheese.

You have three real controls, and they work at different levels.

Google explains what it does with data from sites that run its tools in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.

That page is the one to read if you want the detail behind the AdSense row in the table above.

The Requests You Cannot Block

Two services on this site run before any cookie decision is made, and blocking cookies does not stop either.

Google Fonts is the first. Every page loads the Literata and DM Sans typefaces from fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com, and your browser fetches those files from Google directly, so Google receives your IP address and user agent on every page view.

Cloudflare is the second. It fronts every request to this site, which means Cloudflare processes your IP address and the URL you asked for before our server sees anything.

We name this because a privacy policy that lists only cookies leaves the biggest unavoidable disclosure out.

What This Site Does Not Do

A short list of absences is often more useful than a long list of practices.

• No newsletter and no mailing list. Nowhere on this site is an email address collected for marketing.
• No affiliate or referral links. Not one article carries a commission link, and the site is not enrolled in Amazon Associates or any other referral programme. The Affiliate Disclosure covers this in full.
• No comment system. There is nothing on the site for a reader to post into, so there is no comment data to hold.
• No embedded video. No YouTube, Vimeo, or other player loads on any page, so none of their tracking loads either.
• No heat mapping or session recording. Nothing records your mouse movements, scrolling, or keystrokes.
• No advertising network other than Google. The ads.txt file names one publisher ID, and an ad claiming to come from anywhere else is not authorised.
• No social media pixels. Some articles carry a plain outbound link to Pinterest, which runs no code on this site and receives nothing unless you click.

The remaining software on the site filters spam, builds the contents list on long articles, formats recipes, keeps old links working, compresses images, and sends mail. None of it builds a picture of who you are.

Your Rights and Where to Send the Request

Most privacy requests about this site have to go to Google rather than to us, because Google holds the data those requests are about.

The table sorts the common requests by who actually has the records.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the UK, GDPR gives you rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and portability over personal data.

We rely on legitimate interest for aggregate analytics and for keeping the site available and free of abuse, and Google relies on its own stated basis for the advertising it serves.

If you are in California, CCPA and CPRA give you the right to know what is collected, to delete it, and to opt out of a sale or share of personal information.

We sell nothing ourselves. The behavioural advertising Google serves is the part that some regulators treat as a share, and the opt-out for it is the Google Ads Settings link above.

Anyone anywhere can use the controls in the table. We do not restrict them by region.

Data Retention

• Contact messages. Held in an email inbox for as long as the matter they raise is open. Contact Form 7 stores no copy in the site database.
• Analytics data. Held by Google under the retention setting on the Google Analytics property, which is Google's 14-month default.
• Advertising data. Held by Google under Google's own retention rules rather than ours, and we cannot shorten them.
• Server and Cloudflare logs. Rotated on their normal schedule and used only for operations and abuse handling.
• Checklist ticks. Held in your browser until you clear site data. We could not delete them for you even if you asked.

Children

This site is written for adults buying, storing and cooking cheese, and the terms of use set a minimum age of 13.

We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13. If you believe a child has sent us a message, tell us through the contact page and we will delete it.

Changes to This Policy

We update this policy when what the site loads actually changes, not on a schedule.

The date at the top reflects the most recent revision, and continued use of the site after an update means you accept the revised policy.

A change worth naming would be a new ad network, an affiliate programme, a newsletter, or a consent banner. Any of those would be described here before it went live.

Common Questions