Legal
Cookie policy
A short, honest account of what this website stores on your device — which is very little, and none of it until you have said yes.
Effective date: August 2026.
The short version
This site sets nothing on your device beyond what is strictly necessary to make it work and keep it secure. There are no advertising cookies, no social media trackers and no third-party pixels. If analytics are ever switched on, they will only run after you have clicked Accept — not before, and not if you ignore the banner.
What a cookie actually is
A cookie is a small text file that a website asks your browser to store on your computer, tablet or phone. When you come back, the site can read it again. It is not a program, it cannot run anything and it cannot read the rest of your device.
Cookies do useful, boring things: remembering that you dismissed a banner, keeping you logged in, remembering what is in a basket. They can also do less boring things, such as recognising you across many different websites in order to build an advertising profile. That difference — between a cookie that makes a site work and a cookie that watches you — is the whole reason this page exists.
The same rules apply to similar technologies that are not technically cookies: local storage, session storage, pixels and device fingerprinting. Where this page says “cookies”, it means all of them.
The rule that most websites get wrong
In the UK, cookies are governed by two things: the UK GDPR, and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, usually called PECR.
PECR is the strict one. It says that a cookie which is not strictly necessary to provide the service you have asked for may only be placed on your device after you have given consent. Not after you have had a chance to opt out. Not after a banner has appeared and you have scrolled past it. Before it is set.
Analytics cookies are not strictly necessary. They are useful to the site owner, but the website works perfectly well without them, and the visitor gets nothing from them. The Information Commissioner’s Office has been consistent on this: analytics requires consent, and you cannot fall back on “legitimate interests” instead. A banner that says “by continuing to browse you accept cookies” while analytics has already loaded is not compliant, however common it is.
So, on this site:
- Strictly necessary cookies are set without asking, because the law permits it and the site needs them.
- Analytics cookies are set only if you click Accept.
- Rejecting, closing the banner or doing nothing all have the same result: no analytics cookie.
- There are no advertising or marketing cookies at all.
Every cookie this site may use
The table below covers every cookie that this website is capable of setting. Not all of them will be present on your device — that depends on what you have consented to, and, in the case of analytics, on whether it is enabled at all.
| Cookie | Provider | Purpose | Type | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
acbt_consent | Anxiety CBT Ltd (this website) | Remembers your cookie choice so the banner does not ask you again every single visit. Storing your decision is itself a strictly necessary purpose — without it, your refusal could not be honoured | Strictly necessary No consent required | 6–12 months |
__cf_bm and related Cloudflare cookies | Cloudflare | Distinguishes human visitors from automated traffic, and protects the site from bots and denial-of-service attacks. Contains no personal information about you and is not used for tracking | Strictly necessary Security | Up to 30 minutes (session-based) |
_GRECAPTCHA | Google reCAPTCHA, via the contact form provider (Formspree) | Spam and abuse protection on the contact form. It stops the form being used to send automated junk, which is a service you have asked for when you use the form | Strictly necessary Security. Only set if you interact with the contact form | 6 months |
_ga | Google Analytics | Assigns a randomly generated identifier so that repeat visits can be counted as one person rather than several, and so I can see which pages are actually useful | ANALYTICS — CONSENT REQUIRED | 2 years |
_ga_<container-id> | Google Analytics | Used by Google Analytics 4 to maintain session state. The container ID is unique to this website’s analytics property | ANALYTICS — CONSENT REQUIRED | 2 years |
Two things to be clear about
The analytics cookies are only ever set after you click Accept. If you
reject, close the banner, or simply never respond to it, no _ga cookie is
created and no analytics data about your visit is collected.
At the time of writing, analytics may not be enabled at all. This site was built without any analytics loaded. Google Analytics is listed here so that the policy is complete and honest in advance rather than being quietly updated later. If it is switched on, it will be switched on behind the consent banner described above, and this page will be updated with the date on which that happened.
What is deliberately not here
- No advertising or retargeting cookies. Nothing you see here follows you around the internet.
- No Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn or X tracking pixels.
- No embedded social media widgets, which set cookies simply by being on the page.
- No third-party fonts, which leak your IP address to another company on every page load.
- No cookie is used to record anything about your health, your enquiry or your care.
This is a deliberate choice. People arrive at a site about OCD and anxiety in a private frame of mind, and it seemed wrong to build something that watched them do it.
Changing your mind
You can change your cookie choice at any time, and withdrawing consent is as easy as giving it. That is a requirement of the law, not a courtesy.
If that button does not open anything, the consent banner is not yet live on this site, which means no analytics cookies are being set in the first place. You can also clear cookies for this site in your browser using the instructions below, which resets your choice completely.
Controlling cookies in your browser
Your browser gives you control over all cookies, from every site, independently of anything this website offers. You can block them, delete them, or be prompted each time.
- Chrome: Settings → Privacy and security → Third-party cookies
- Safari: Settings → Privacy, or on iPhone, Settings → Apps → Safari
- Firefox: Settings → Privacy & Security
- Edge: Settings → Cookies and site permissions
Most browsers also have a private or incognito mode, which discards cookies when you close the window. Given the subject matter of this site, that is worth knowing about if you are using a shared computer.
One caveat: blocking all cookies everywhere will break things on other websites — online banking and anything you log into. Blocking them here will not break anything, but it may mean the consent banner asks you again on every visit, because the cookie that remembers your answer is itself a cookie.
For independent guidance, the Information Commissioner’s Office has a plain-English section on cookies at ico.org.uk.
Questions
If something here is unclear, or you think this site is setting something it should not be, email drdannycbt@proton.me and I will look into it and answer you properly. The privacy policy covers everything else about how your information is handled.