Cookie Policy

What this notice covers

This notice explains what electe.net puts on your device, what it is for, and how you change it. It covers electe.net and the public sites we run alongside it: the newsletter pages, The ELECTE Quarterly, the media hub and the radio page.

It does not cover platform.electe.net, which has its own account session.

ELECTE S.R.L., Via Montenapoleone 8, 20121 Milano (MI), Italy (VAT IT 12771670960) is responsible for what this notice describes. Our supervisory authority is the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali.

How we ask

Our consent layer runs in offline mode. There is no consent backend: when the banner appears, nothing is sent to a consent vendor, and when you choose, your choice is written to your own browser and stays there. No consent company holds a record of what visitors to this site decide.

Your choice is stored under the name c15t, twice: as a first-party cookie, so the page knows it on your next visit, and in your browser's local storage.

Three categories

• Essential. What the site needs to work, plus cookieless visit counting. Always on.
• Analytics. Off until you turn it on.
• Marketing. Off until you turn it on. One tool sits here — the Apollo website visitor tracker — and it is the only reason this category exists. Remove it and the banner drops to two.

"Accept essentials only"

There is no "Reject All" button. It is labelled "Accept essentials only", in all 21 languages the site runs in, and pressing it keeps the essential category on and leaves everything else off.

Changing your mind

Every page has a Cookie settings link in the footer, on the legal information line. It opens the same dialog the banner opens, and you can change or withdraw a choice there at any time. There is no floating widget following you down the page.

The analytics we run without asking

We count page views with analytics software we host ourselves, and we run it outside consent as an essential service.

It runs on our own servers in Nuremberg, Germany, and its script is served from our own domain. It sets no cookie, writes nothing to your device and reads nothing from it. It creates no identifier, so it cannot recognise you between page views, between visits or across sites. No other company receives the data. What we get is a count — pages, referrers, countries, in aggregate.

The consent rule applies to storing or reading something on your device. This stores and reads nothing, which is why it keeps working when you accept essentials only.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics 4 runs in Google's Advanced Consent Mode:

• the tag loads before you have chosen anything;
• it immediately declares every consent signal denied — analytics storage, ad storage, and the two newer advertising signals, ad_user_data and ad_personalization;
• while denied, it sends cookieless pings. No _ga cookie is written, nothing is read from your device, and the pings carry no identifier;
• if you accept the Analytics category, the tag is sent a consent update granting analytics storage, and only then does it behave like ordinary Google Analytics.

The denial is explicit and in place before anything could be stored, rather than depending on our own script timing to hold it back.

Session recording

Microsoft Clarity records how visitors interact with pages — clicks, scrolls, mouse movement — so we can find usability problems. It loads only after you accept the Analytics category.

Advertising and audience pixels

Each pixel the site can carry exists only when its own configuration value is set at build time. With the value unset, the pixel is not in the page at all.

One is live: the Apollo website visitor tracker, in the Marketing category, which loads only after you accept that category.

What is actually stored on your device

Name — Set by — Category — Purpose — How long

c15t (cookie) — us, first party — Essential — Records which categories you allowed, so the banner stops asking — 12 months

c15t (local storage) — us, first party — Essential — The same record, read by the page in your browser — Until you clear site data

electe-a11y-prefs (local storage) — us, first party — Essential — Remembers the accessibility settings you switched on — reduced transparency, increased contrast, larger text — Until you clear site data

electe_member (cookie) — us, first party — Essential — Signs you in to post a comment, after you authenticate with your newsletter account. Set only if you sign in, and not readable by scripts — 30 minutes

payload-token (cookie) — us, first party — Essential — Staff sign-in to the admin area. Never set for site visitors — 2 hours

_ga, _ga_<property id> (cookies) — Google — Analytics — Google Analytics, after you accept the Analytics category — 2 years

_clck, _clsk (cookies) — Microsoft — Analytics — Microsoft Clarity, after you accept the Analytics category — _clck 1 year, _clsk 1 day

Apollo website visitor tracker — Apollo — Marketing — Recognises returning visitors from companies we are already talking to, after you accept the Marketing category — Up to 2 years

__cf_bm, and cf_clearance if you are challenged — Cloudflare — Essential — Bot management and traffic protection in front of the site. __cf_bm is set on ordinary requests; cf_clearance only if you are shown and pass a security challenge — 30 minutes each

Embeds load only when you click them

Videos, the radio player and the founder profile badges are not embedded directly. Each is a still placeholder until you act on it.

• Video: the poster image is served from our own storage. The player frame — youtube-nocookie.com, or a plain HTML5 player for videos we host — is created only when you press play.
• Radio: the player frame is created only when you press play.
• LinkedIn: the founder badges are two ordinary links until you press the button that loads them; only then does LinkedIn's script run.

Until you click, none of those companies receive a request from your browser, including your IP address.

Fonts, search and notifications

Fonts are hosted by us and served from our own domain. We do not load them from Google Fonts, so no font request sends your IP address to Google.

Site search runs on our own servers in Nuremberg. Queries go to us and set no cookie.

Browser notifications are off unless you ask for them. Turning them on registers a small service-worker file in your browser and creates a subscription with your browser vendor's push service, which we store so we can send you the notification. You can revoke the permission in your browser at any time.

Controlling this in your browser

Your browser can block or delete cookies and clear local storage, for this site specifically or in general.

Clearing cookies and site data for electe.net deletes your consent record along with everything else, so the banner comes back on your next visit. Blocking storage does not stop the essential items in the table above from being attempted — it makes them fail, which for the sign-in cookie means you cannot stay signed in to comment.

For everything else we do with personal data, see our Privacy Policy.

Changes

We update this notice when what the site loads changes. The date below is the last change.

Questions

Write to privacy@electe.net. For anything else, hello@electe.net.

Last updated 22 August 2026.