Cookie policy

A cookie is a tiny text file a site asks the browser to keep, so it can find it again on the next visit. It exists to remember something: that you are already signed in, which language you are reading in, or — as in our case — that you have already answered a question and would rather not be asked again every time.

Alongside cookies there are other forms of local storage, such as *localStorage* and *IndexedDB*. They work differently but raise the same questions, so this page treats them together: when we write “cookie”, we mean anything that ends up on your device.

The distinction that matters is not technical but one of purpose. Technical cookies make the site work and the law does not require your consent for them. Everything else — non-anonymised statistics, profiling, advertising — requires you to say yes before it is switched on.

One cookie, first-party and technical: the one that stores your choice on this very page. Nothing else is written while you browse.

The entries marked not active in the table below are declared for transparency: they are provided for in the code but are never written today, because the tool that would use them is not installed. You will find them in the preferences panel, switched off, so that the day they become relevant the choice is already in your hands.

These are the ones without which the site cannot do its job, which is why the panel does not let you turn them off. In our case there really are very few.

italiamo_consent stores the answer you gave the banner. It holds three things: the version number of the notice, the date of your choice, and a yes or no for the statistics category. It contains no identifier, gives you no number, and cannot be used to recognise you on another site. It is the lightest possible way to remember a refusal — and without it we would have to ask you again on every page.

Google Firebase features only come into play when you take a specific action. Submitting the enrollment or contact form allows the database library to create technical entries in *IndexedDB* to manage the connection. Signing in to the private area — which concerns the administrator only — has Firebase Authentication keep the session by the same mechanism. As long as you are just reading the site, none of this is created.

No measurement tool is currently active. There is no Google Analytics, no visit counter, no third-party pixels.

If we ever decided to measure how many people read the site, we would use Google Analytics through Firebase, and it would work like this: the code would not even be downloaded before your consent, and the “Statistics” entry in the panel would stay off until you switched it on. We would update this page and bring the banner back, because a consent given for a different scenario would not hold.

This page would be longer if we had gone for the convenient options. We did not, and it is worth saying why.

• The typefaces are hosted by us. Poppins, Playfair Display and the Arabic Noto families live in the site’s own folder, not on fonts.googleapis.com. Loading them from Google’s CDN would have sent your IP address to the United States in the first millisecond of your visit, before any consent.
• No embedded videos, no maps, no social buttons. Those are the three most common ways third-party cookies find their way into a site unnoticed.
• The WhatsApp button is an ordinary link. It loads no external code and writes nothing: it opens WhatsApp only when you tap it, and from that moment Meta’s notice applies.

Two ways, and neither requires writing to us.

From the site’s panel. The “Cookie preferences” link sits at the foot of every page and reopens exactly the same window you saw on your first visit. From there you can change categories or withdraw everything.

From your browser. Every browser lets you view a site’s cookies and delete them, as well as block them wholesale. The instructions differ between programs and are in their own help pages: search for “cookies” in the settings of Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge. One caveat: deleting italiamo_consent also deletes the memory of your refusal, so the banner will come back.

If you choose nothing and close the banner with the ×, that is fine: it means no consent, and we activate nothing. We will ask again on your next visit.

This page is written with the following in mind:

• Article 122 of the Italian Privacy Code (Legislative Decree 196/2003, as amended by Legislative Decree 101/2018), which exempts technical cookies alone from consent;
• the Guidelines on cookies and other tracking tools of the Italian Data Protection Authority, dated 10 June 2021 and applicable from 10 January 2022, from which come the symmetry of the banner buttons, the fact that the × does not count as consent, and the six-month interval before asking again;
• Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR) for what makes consent valid;
• Lebanese Law No. 81/2018, which requires a transparent and accessible privacy policy and consent for non-essential cookies.

For the full picture of our processing, not just cookies, see the privacy notice.