Legal

Cookie policy

A short, honest account of what this website stores on your device. It is one small cookie, and it does not track you. Page visits are counted without cookies.

Effective date: 30 September 2026. This is version 1.2. The version history is at the bottom of the page.

The short version

This site does not track you. There are no advertising cookies, no social media pixels and no tracking scripts. Cloudflare counts page visits without setting a cookie or storing anything on your device. The site’s own code sets one small cookie, which remembers that you have seen the cookie notice.

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. This site uses none of those either.

What the law says

In the UK, cookies are governed by two things: the UK GDPR, and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, usually called PECR. The starting point in PECR is that anything not strictly necessary to provide the service you have asked for may only be placed on your device after you have given consent.

UK law changed in February 2026. Simple, privacy-friendly visitor statistics can now be collected without a consent banner, as long as the site explains it and offers an easy opt-out. Anything that goes further, including Google Analytics, advertising or profiling, still needs your consent first. This site currently collects no visitor statistics at all. If that changes, I will choose a tool that does not use cookies or identify you, explain it here, and give you a one-click opt-out. If I ever use a tool that needs your consent, it will stay off until you say yes.

So, on this site today:

The cookie notice is a notice, not a request for consent, because there is nothing to consent to. It has one button, OK, and a link to this page.
Pressing OK sets the one cookie described below, so the notice does not reappear on every visit.
There are no analytics cookies. Page visits are counted by Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookie and stores nothing on your device; see below.
There are no advertising or marketing cookies at all.

Every cookie this site sets

The table below lists everything. The first row is the only cookie set by this website’s own code. The second row is conditional: those cookies come from Cloudflare, which hosts the site, and you will only ever see them in the circumstances described.

Cookie	Provider	Purpose	Type	Duration
`acbt_consent` Value: `v1:seen`	Anxiety CBT Ltd (this website)	Remembers that you have seen the cookie notice. It holds no identifier and nothing about you	Strictly necessary	182 days (six months)
`__cf_bm`, `cf_clearance`	Cloudflare	Only set if Cloudflare’s bot protection is switched on or you are shown a security check. Tells humans from bots. Not used for tracking	Strictly necessary Security	30 minutes for `__cf_bm`; up to a year for `cf_clearance`

The contact form sets no cookie. It sends your message to the form provider, Formspree, only when you press send. The privacy policy explains what happens to it.

What may be added later

The table above lists everything this site sets today. If a new cookie or similar technology is added, it will appear in that table, with its purpose, provider and lifetime, before it goes live. Anything that is not strictly necessary, and that is not covered by the legal exception for simple visitor statistics, will be off until you accept it.

If I add visitor statistics, my first choice will be a tool that uses no cookies, does not identify you and does not share data with advertisers. If I ever use a tool that does place cookies or passes data to a company for its own purposes, it will be switched off by default and will run only if you choose Accept. Any choice you made on an earlier version of the cookie notice will not be carried over: you will be asked afresh.

Visit counts without cookies

The site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page visits. It is a small script served by Cloudflare, which already hosts the site. It sets no cookie, uses no local storage and stores nothing on your device, which is why it is not in the table above. For each page view it records the page, the page you came from, your browser and device type, how quickly the page loaded, and the country derived from your IP address, and Cloudflare turns that into totals. It does not identify you and does not follow you to other websites. I see only the totals, and I use them to learn which pages people find useful. Because nothing is stored on or read from your device, the cookie rules do not require consent for it, and the notice on the site is a notice rather than a request.

What is deliberately not here

No analytics cookies. The visit count described above stores nothing on your device.
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. The fonts are served from this site.
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.

Seeing the notice again

There is no choice to change at the moment, because the site has nothing switched on that you could refuse. If you want to see the cookie notice again, use this button. If a real choice is ever added, this is also where you will be able to change it.

You can also clear cookies for this site in your browser using the instructions below, which removes the cookie 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, such as online banking and anything you log into. Blocking them here will not break anything, but it may mean the cookie notice appears on every visit, because the thing that remembers you have seen it is itself a cookie.

For independent guidance, the Information Commission (the ICO) 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.

Version history

Version 1.2, 30 September 2026. Regulator name updated to the Information Commission; Cloudflare cookie duration aligned with the privacy policy; cookieless visit counting (Cloudflare Web Analytics) added and described.
Version 1.1, 21 September 2026. Cookie table reduced to what the site actually sets. Google Analytics and reCAPTCHA entries removed because neither is used. Cloudflare security cookies described as conditional. Cookie notice described as a one-button notice. Statement of the law updated for the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. “What may be added later” section added.
Version 1.0, 11 September 2026. Previous version.