Cookie Notice

Last verified against a full site scan on 21 September 2026

The short version

This site sets no cookies of its own. It runs no analytics, no advertising and no visitor tracking, and I do not know who you are or what you read here.

What it does do is embed a few things published by other organisations: a dashboard, some certificate badges and some institution logos. When one of those loads, the organisation serving it can set its own cookies in your browser, and I have no control over what they set or how long they keep it. That is the whole of the cookie activity on this site, and it is listed below by the page that triggers it.

Nothing in that second group loads until you allow it. When you first arrive you are asked; until you answer, and if you decline, those embeds are not requested at all, so the organisations behind them never see your visit. You can change your mind at any time with the Cookie settings link at the bottom of every page.

Cookies this site sets

None. There are no first party cookies on this domain.

The choice you make about the categories below is remembered in your browser's local storage, not in a cookie. It stays on your device, is never sent to this site or anywhere else, and is cleared when you clear site data. It expires after a year, at which point you are asked again.

Cookies set by embedded content

Grouped by what triggers them, so you can see which page brings which organisation into play. Expiry, and the Secure and HttpOnly flags, are as observed in the scan rather than as documented by the provider.

The home page

The certificate badges and the university and academy logos in the Career and Education section are loaded from the organisations that issued them. Two of those organisations set a cookie; the others set none. Category: Functional (C0003).

WMF-Uniq set by upload.wikimedia.org
  • What it does Set by the Wikimedia Foundation because one university logo on this page is loaded from Wikimedia Commons rather than from this site. It is a unique visitor identifier used for their own traffic measurement. This is the longest lived cookie on the site and the only one that reaches the home page.
  • Expires One year
  • Secure flag Yes
  • HttpOnly flag Yes
_session_id set by api.accredible.com
  • What it does Set by the certification provider when a credential badge image is fetched from its API. It holds a session reference for their service. Nobody signs in on this site, so it identifies nothing about you here.
  • Expires When you close the browser. It is a session cookie.
  • Secure flag Yes
  • HttpOnly flag Yes

The GDPR Fines Dashboard page

The dashboard on that page is a Microsoft Power BI report embedded from Microsoft's servers. Loading it brings in nine cookies across three Microsoft hosts. Seven of them keep the embed working; two measure how it is used. The two cannot be refused separately from the seven, because they all arrive with the report, which is why the whole embed sits behind one choice. Category: Performance (C0002).

ai_user set by app.powerbi.com
  • What it does Microsoft Azure Application Insights. Assigns a persistent identifier so Microsoft can count returning users of the embedded report. This is the one genuinely analytical cookie on the site.
  • Expires One year
  • Secure flag Yes
  • HttpOnly flag No
ai_session set by app.powerbi.com
  • What it does Microsoft Azure Application Insights. Groups a single visit to the embedded report into one session for the same measurement.
  • Expires Less than a day
  • Secure flag Yes
  • HttpOnly flag No
WFESessionId set by app.powerbi.com
  • What it does Identifies the front end session serving the embedded report.
  • Expires When you close the browser. It is a session cookie.
  • Secure flag Yes
  • HttpOnly flag No
ARRAffinity set by app.powerbi.com, appsource.powerbi.com and pbivisuals.powerbi.com
  • What it does Keeps your requests going to the same server while the dashboard is open. It is a load balancing cookie and carries no identifier of you.
  • Expires When you close the browser. It is a session cookie.
  • Secure flag Yes
  • HttpOnly flag Yes
ARRAffinitySameSite set by app.powerbi.com, appsource.powerbi.com and pbivisuals.powerbi.com
  • What it does Keeps your requests going to the same server while the dashboard is open. It is a load balancing cookie and carries no identifier of you. It is the same cookie as the one above with a stricter cross site rule.
  • Expires When you close the browser. It is a session cookie.
  • Secure flag Yes
  • HttpOnly flag Yes

Every other page

No cookies. The tools, the digests, the calculator and the assessments run entirely in your browser and contact nothing.

Storage that is not a cookie

The rules that cover cookies cover anything stored on or read from your device, so this section covers the rest of it.

Set by this site. Some tools keep your answers in local storage so that a long assessment survives a reload. The GDPR Readiness Assessment is the main one, and it has its own Save, Load, Clear and Forget controls. That data stays in your browser and is never transmitted. The cookie choice described above is stored the same way.

Set by the embedded dashboard. If you allow the Power BI embed, Microsoft writes a good deal more to local and session storage than it does to cookies: report configuration and theme data, a service access token for its own API, and a buffer of Application Insights telemetry waiting to be sent. None of it is readable by this site, and all of it is removed when you clear site data for powerbi.com.

Managing this yourself

The Cookie settings link in the footer of every page reopens the choices and applies the change immediately. Refusing a category after having allowed it stops the content loading from then on, but it does not reach into another organisation's cookies and delete them, because no site can do that. To remove what is already there, clear cookies for the site in question in your browser settings.

The providers named above document their own processing: Microsoft in the Microsoft Privacy Statement, the Wikimedia Foundation in its cookie statement, and the certification provider in its own privacy policy.

How this list is kept honest

This page is written from a full crawl of the site rather than from memory, and the date at the top is the date of the last crawl. Anything the scan did not observe is not listed here, and anything it did observe is, including the parts that are inconvenient. If you find a cookie on this site that is not described on this page, that is a defect and I would like to hear about it.

You can check it yourself without taking my word for it: open your browser's developer tools, look under Application or Storage, and compare what is there with what is above.