This policy sets out exactly what Finance In Your Pocket stores in your browser, what it is for, and what changes when you opt out. The short version: the calculators themselves store only what you typed, on your own device; advertising is what funds the site, and you can stop it being personalized to you at any time, from any page, without losing anything.
1. Cookies, local storage, and the difference
A cookie is a small text file a site stores on your device and sends back to a server with each request. Because they travel with requests, cookies are the mechanism most commonly used for cross-site tracking.
Local storage is a separate browser feature that holds data on your device and does not transmit it anywhere. Data in local storage is readable only by scripts running on the site that wrote it, and it never leaves your machine unless a script deliberately sends it — which nothing on this site does.
The distinction matters here, because most of what this site stores is local storage rather than cookies, and the two are frequently lumped together in policies that then become impossible to act on. They are separated below.
2. What this site itself stores
Everything in this section is local storage, and all of it stays on your device:
| Name | What it holds | Consent |
|---|---|---|
| ad-opt-out-v1 | Present only if you used the "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" control, so the opt-out survives between visits. Holds the word true and nothing else — no identifier, nothing that describes you. | Not required |
| cookie-notice-v1 | Whether you have already seen the notice at the bottom of the screen, so it is shown once rather than on every page. | Not required |
| cookie-consent-v1 | Read, never written. An earlier version of this site asked visitors to accept or decline advertising before it loaded. If you declined back then, that answer is still honored as an opt-out today rather than quietly reset. | Not required |
| fincalc:* | The values you last entered into a calculator, plus saved scenarios and calculation history where a calculator offers them, so the form is pre-filled when you come back. Never transmitted anywhere. | Not required |
| theme | Your light or dark mode preference. | Not required |
None of these require consent under privacy law, because they are strictly necessary for a feature you asked for or hold no personal data. None of them can identify you, and none of them are readable by any other website.
3. Analytics — and why there is no consent question here
The site uses Vercel Web Analytics to count page views in aggregate and Vercel Speed Insights to measure real-world loading performance. Both are cookieless: they set no cookie, write nothing to local storage, and do not build a profile or a persistent identifier for you.
Because they store nothing on your device and process no personal identifier, they do not require consent and are not covered by the banner. There is deliberately no Google Analytics on this site, so there is no GA cookie to accept or reject.
4. Advertising cookies — the third-party ones
The site is funded by advertising served through Google AdSense. Google and its advertising partners set these cookies on their own domains, not on this one. Google controls the list and it can change; the ones commonly involved are:
| Cookie | Set by | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| __gads | Measures ad interactions and limits how often the same ad is shown to you. | |
| __gpi | Ad personalization and measurement across sites in Google's network. | |
| IDE | doubleclick.net | Attributes ad performance and personalizes advertising. |
| test_cookie | doubleclick.net | Short-lived check of whether your browser accepts cookies at all. |
These are third-party cookies set on Google's domains, not this site's. Their lifetimes and exact behavior are determined by Google, and Google's own policy on how it uses data from partner sites is the authoritative description of what it does with them.
5. Google Consent Mode v2
The site implements Google's Consent Mode v2. A script running ahead of everything else sets four signals — ad_storage, ad_user_data, ad_personalization, and analytics_storage — before the AdSense tag is allowed to make a single request. What they are set to depends on where you are and on what you have already told us:
- European Economic Area, United Kingdom, Switzerland: all four start at denied. They are lifted only by Google's certified consent management platform, which asks you directly and records your answer in the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework format that Google requires for these countries.
- United States and elsewhere: they start at granted, which is what US privacy law contemplates — advertising there is something you may opt out of, not something you must opt into. The opt-out below is the mechanism.
- Anyone who has opted out, by using the footer control or by browsing with Global Privacy Control switched on:
ad_user_dataandad_personalizationare set back to denied in the same script, before the first ad request of the visit — not after it.
If you want to verify this rather than take it on trust, open your browser's console and inspect window.dataLayer: the consent commands are the first entries in it, and they are there before pagead2.googlesyndication.com appears in the network panel.
6. What actually happens if you opt out
The site works identically. Every calculator returns the same result, every article and reference table is fully readable, and no feature is withheld. There is no “pay or consent” wall and no degraded experience.
Advertising does not disappear — it stops being about you. Instead of drawing on what Google knows about your activity across other sites, an ad is chosen from the page you are on: mortgage advertisers on the mortgage calculator, and so on. The cookies in section 4 that exist purely to personalize stop being useful, and Google is instructed not to use your data for them.
This is a deliberate design choice, and worth being plain about: the earlier version of this site withheld advertising entirely from anyone who declined, which sounds stricter but mostly meant readers who ignored a banner cost the site its funding without gaining any privacy they had actually asked for. Denying the personalization signals gives you the thing the law entitles you to — no cross-site profiling — while a page you read for free still pays for itself.
7. Changing your mind
Your choice is remembered in local storage, not a cookie, which means clearing cookies alone will not reset it. To change it:
- To opt out of ad personalization, use the Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information link in the footer of every page. It is available site-wide and takes effect immediately, on the next ad request rather than the next visit.
- To opt back in, clear this site's stored data from your browser settings — in most browsers, Settings → Privacy and security → Clear browsing data, choosing site data for this domain. Note that this also clears your saved calculator inputs and theme preference. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control, turn that off too, or the opt-out is simply reapplied on the next page load, which is the behavior California requires.
- To change your answer in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland, reopen Google's consent dialog from the privacy link it places on the page; it holds the authoritative record of your choice for those countries, not this site.
- To control Google ad personalization everywhere, not just here, use your Google account's ad settings, which apply across every site in Google's network.
8. Browser-level controls
Every major browser lets you block third-party cookies entirely, which will stop the advertising cookies in section 4 regardless of what you clicked here. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge all expose this in their privacy settings, and Safari and Firefox block many third-party trackers by default.
Blocking third-party cookies does not break anything on this site, because none of the features depend on them.
Some browsers send a Global Privacy Control signal. Where a browser sends it, this site treats it as an opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information for the purposes of the California Consumer Privacy Act, consistent with the rights described in the Privacy Policy.
9. Clearing saved calculator data on its own
If you only want a calculator to forget your inputs, the simplest route is to enter new values — the stored entry is overwritten rather than accumulated. Calculators that keep a scenario list or calculation history provide their own controls for removing entries.
To remove everything at once, clear this site's data from your browser settings as described in section 7. Nothing is stored on any server, so there is nothing to request the deletion of from us — clearing your browser genuinely is the complete deletion.
10. Changes to this policy
If the site adds a technology that stores something new, or if the advertising provider changes what it sets, this page is updated and the date at the top changes with it. The categories above are the complete current list, not a representative sample.
Questions about anything here, or something you found in your browser that is not described above, go to the contact page.