Privacy Policy

Last updated October 2, 2026.

Contact messages

The contact form asks for your name, email address, subject and message. These details allow a reply to the question or correction you send.

Please do not include passwords, payment information or medical records in a message. The contact page is also the place to ask about personal information you have sent to the site.

Analytics and advertising tools

KnowTheCheese includes Google Analytics and Google advertising code. These tools can send information about visits and devices to Google and can use cookies or other identifiers.

Third-party vendors, including Google, use advertising cookies to select ads based on visits to this and other websites. Where personalised advertising is enabled, Google and its partners may use information from those visits to personalise ads.

Google describes the information it receives, its purposes and available controls in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.

Analytics identifiers can distinguish visits or browsers even when a reader has not supplied a name. A report containing totals does not mean that the tools collect only anonymous totals.

The site's ads.txt file also lists Monumetric, an ad management company, together with the ad exchanges that sell space through it. When those companies serve ads here, they can use cookies and similar technologies in the same way, as described in Monumetric's privacy policy.

Consent choices

Readers in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland see a consent message from Google on their first visit. The choice made there decides whether Google's advertising tags may use cookies and personal data to personalise ads.

The choice is stored in a cookie in your browser. Clearing this site's cookies removes it, and the message appears again on your next visit.

Browser controls

You can manage Google's personalised advertising through Google Ads Settings. Turning personalisation off does not necessarily stop ads or all processing for measurement, security and fraud prevention.

Google also provides an Analytics opt-out browser add-on. Browser settings let you block cookies and clear stored site data, although cookie blocking does not stop every network request or remove data already received by a service.

Settings in Google tools and your browser serve different purposes from a website's consent choices. Clearing cookies can also remove saved preferences, so you may need to make those choices again.

Who runs the site and how long information is kept

KnowTheCheese is run by its editorial team, and privacy questions go to [email protected]. Contact form messages arrive in that inbox by email and are not stored in the website's database.

The web server keeps access logs, which include IP addresses, for about 14 days before they are deleted. Google keeps the data its Analytics and advertising tools receive under its own retention settings and policies.

Children

KnowTheCheese is written for a general adult audience and is not directed at children under 13, or under 16 where local law sets a higher age. The contact form is the only place the site asks for personal details, and it does not ask for a reader's age.

If a child has sent personal information through the contact form, a parent or guardian can write to [email protected] with the approximate date and subject of the message and ask for it to be deleted from the inbox.

Privacy requests

For a question about information handled by KnowTheCheese, contact us with enough detail to identify the matter. For example, give the approximate date and subject of a previous message rather than sending extra identification documents unasked.

Depending on the law that applies, you may have rights to access, correct or delete personal information, restrict or object to processing, or complain to a data protection authority. A request about this site's handling of your information can be sent to us even where a third-party service is involved.

Google's controls can help you manage information held by Google. They do not replace a request concerning KnowTheCheese's own handling of your data.