This is a cookie banner. We are legally obligated to inform you that something is happening on this website. We will not tell you what it is. The law requires that you be notified, not that you be informed, and we have chosen to satisfy the smaller of those two requirements.
You may be wondering what your options are. You have one. It is the button on the right. Pressing it will dismiss this banner and consent, on your behalf, to every practice we have declined to describe. There is no button that rejects anything. There is no button that asks a follow up question. We considered adding one and then we considered our quarterly targets instead.
We want to be clear that your participation here is genuinely meaningless. The cookies were set when the page loaded. The data was already collected. This banner exists so that a record can show you were standing nearby when it happened. Dismissing it is a formality you perform for our benefit, not yours.
For the sake of completeness we will now describe the categories of cookies we use, in language reviewed by people whose job was to make it survive scrutiny rather than convey meaning. There are essential cookies, which are essential to us. There are functional cookies, which add functionality of a kind we are not at liberty to specify. There are analytics cookies, which analyse you. There are marketing cookies, which is where the rent comes from.
Some of these cookies are set by us. Many of them are set by partners. We have a great many partners. We do not know all of them. New partners are onboarded faster than this sentence can be updated, and each of them arrives with their own cookies, their own purposes, and their own banner on their own website that says roughly what this one says. It is banners all the way down.
You have the right to manage your preferences. The link to manage your preferences leads to a second page with a third banner and a list of two hundred vendors, each with a toggle that is enabled by default and a legitimate interest that cannot be toggled at all. Managing your preferences takes approximately forty minutes and resets the moment you close the tab. We are confident you will not do this. We have data.
We could have built a website that respected you. The technology has existed for years. Instead we built this, and then we built a small piece of software to make you press a button about it, and then we held a meeting where everyone agreed it was unfortunate but necessary, and then we went to lunch. The lunch was nice. You were not invited.
Thank you for reading this far. Nobody reads this far. The fact that you did changes nothing, which is, in its own small way, the entire point. Please press the button.
