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AFK Journal

One measurement tool, switched off until you say otherwise. Here is what that means in detail, and what the few third parties involved can see.

The short version

AFK Journal uses Google Analytics 4 to count visits, and nothing else. There is no advertising, no ad network, no profiling, no cross-site tracking, no social embeds, no comments, no newsletter, no accounts and no logins. There is nothing to sign up for, so there is no personal data to collect from a sign-up, and none is collected.

Analytics is off until you turn it on. Until you press Accept on the consent banner, no cookie is set and no identifier is stored in your browser. If you never accept, that never changes.

What happens when you open a page

  • The page is served by the host. This site runs on Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel handles the request and keeps short-lived operational logs — the kind of request data (IP address, user agent, URL, timestamp) that every server needs to deliver a page and defend itself from abuse. Those logs belong to the host, not to this site, and are not used here for any purpose.
  • Images load from the content CDN. Article images and game art are stored in Sanity and served from Sanity's image CDN, so your browser makes a request to their domain. They see what any CDN sees for an image request: an IP address, a user agent and the file requested.
  • Text, styles and fonts come from this site. Every web font is served as an ordinary file from this domain: two of them ship with the site, and the third is fetched from its provider when the site is built and then served from here like any other file. Opening a page makes no request to Google Fonts, Fontshare or any other font host — the build machine is the only thing that ever contacts one.
  • Google Analytics loads. This is the one third-party script on the site, and the rest of this page is about it.

Analytics

The site uses Google Analytics 4 to answer one question: how many people read which pages. It runs under Google Consent Mode v2, which means the tag is loaded on every page but is told what it is allowed to do before it does anything.

Advertising signals are denied permanently and are not negotiable here: ad storage, ad user data and ad personalisation are set to denied on every page load, for every visitor, whatever you choose. Google Signals and ad personalisation features are switched off in the tag configuration. This site sells nothing and advertises nothing, so there is no version of it in which those are on.

Before you choose, or if you reject

With analytics storage denied — which is the state you arrive in — Google Analytics sets no cookies and reads none. It sends a cookieless, non-identifying ping so the page can be counted at all: the page address, the referrer, a coarse device and browser description, and a timestamp, with no identifier that persists between page loads and nothing that ties two visits together. Google aggregates those pings into modelled totals. Nothing is written to your browser and nothing here can single you out.

If you accept

Analytics storage is granted and Google Analytics sets two first-party cookies on this domain,_ga and _ga_7C9S9F43Y9. Both are random identifiers with a default lifetime of two years, and their only job is to recognise that two page views came from the same browser so a returning reader is not counted twice. From then on Google Analytics processes, for this site:

  • the pages you view here, and the order you view them in;
  • the referrer — the page or search that sent you, where your browser sends one;
  • an approximate location (country, and usually region or city) derived from your IP address. GA4 derives the location and then discards the address: it does not log or store IP addresses;
  • device and browser information — screen size, browser and version, operating system, language;
  • the two identifiers above, which are meaningless outside this site.

That is the whole list. No demographics, no interest categories, no advertising audiences, no user id, and nothing joined to any other site.

Who processes it, and on what basis

Google Ireland Limited (and Google LLC where data is handled outside the EEA) acts as the processor for this analytics data, under Google's terms; AFK Journal is the controller and decides what is measured. Google's own handling is described in their privacy policy.

The legal basis is your consent, given by pressing Accept, and nothing else: there is no "legitimate interest" claim behind the banner doing the work the banner is supposed to do.

Changing your mind

Consent is withdrawable at any time and with the same number of clicks it took to give:Cookie settings in the footer of every page re-opens the banner. Choosing Reject there switches analytics storage back to denied and expires the_ga cookies straight away.

Independently of this site, Google publishes a browser add-on that opts you out of Google Analytics everywhere: the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. Blocking cookies, blocking googletagmanager.com, or any tracker blocker, also works — nothing on this site depends on analytics running.

Cookies and local storage

The two _ga cookies described above are the only cookies this site can set, and only after you accept. Your choice itself is stored in your browser's local storage — not as a cookie, never sent to a server, and it holds nothing but the answer, the date you gave it and a version number. The full detail, including how to clear all of it, is on the cookie policy page.

The search box is a plain form that navigates to /search with your query in the URL. The query is used to run the search and to render the results, and nothing more: it is not stored by this site, not associated with you, and search result pages are marked as not for indexing and are not cached. As with any request, the query is part of the URL and therefore visible in the host's operational logs described above — and, if you have accepted analytics, in the page address Google Analytics records for that page view.

Video

Some posts include a video. Nothing from YouTube loads until you click play: until then, you are looking at a still image served from this site. Clicking play loads the player fromyoutube-nocookie.com, at which point YouTube and Google receive the request and their own privacy terms apply. If you never click, YouTube is never contacted.

Children

Nothing here is directed at children. The site asks nobody for personal data, and the analytics described above is not used to identify anyone, child or adult.

Posts link out constantly — that is the point of the sourcing policy. Once you follow a link, you are on someone else's site under their terms, and this page stops applying.

Your data, and requests about it

There is no account to delete, no profile to export and no mailing list to leave, because none of those exist. The analytics data is not held under a name, an email address or anything else that would let this site find "your" rows in it — which is the point of running it this way, and also means an access or deletion request cannot be answered by pulling a record that does not exist. What you can do is withdraw consent, which stops any further collection and expires the cookies, and clear the site's storage in your browser.

If you want a copy of, or the deletion of, the host's operational request logs, that request has to go to the host: this site neither holds them nor can act on them.

Changes

If this site ever adds something that changes the picture — ads, affiliate links, a newsletter, a second analytics tool — this page will be updated before it goes live, and the date above will change with it. That is what happened with the analytics described here, and it is not going to be changed quietly.

Questions or privacy requests can go to info@afkjournal.com.

This page describes how the site works. It is a plain description, not legal advice.