There Are No Cookies.

You may have noticed something unusual happened when you loaded this page. There was no banner. No popup. No modal with a blurred background asking you to choose between "Accept All" and a smaller, harder-to-find button that takes you through four more screens before it lets you say no to the thing you already said no to. There was no "Manage Preferences" panel with forty-seven toggles, all pre-set to "on."

That's because this website does not use cookies.

At all. Zero. None. Not analytical cookies, not functional cookies, not "strictly necessary" cookies that are somehow also tracking your behaviour, and certainly not advertising cookies. We are not collecting anything about you. We do not know you visited this page. We do not know how long you stayed, what you clicked, where you came from, or what device you're on.

As far as this server is concerned, you are a ghost. A very welcome ghost, but a ghost nonetheless.

Why No Cookies?

Because we don't need them. Here's a thought experiment: what does this website actually need to do? It needs to show you some text and images. That's it. HTML, CSS, a few fonts from Google, and some static files. A web server hands those files to your browser. Your browser displays them. This is how the web worked in 1997 and it still works perfectly well now.

Not a single part of that process requires us to know who you are. We don't have a login system. We're not running a shop. We're not personalising content. There is no earthly reason — technical, operational, or otherwise — for us to store anything in your browser.

The reason most websites have cookies isn't because they need them to function. It's because they've bolted on advertising networks, analytics platforms, social media sharing buttons, A/B testing frameworks, retargeting pixels, heatmap tools, and about fifteen other third-party scripts that each bring their own tracking payload. The cookie consent banner exists to cover the legal liability created by all of that surveillance. Remove the surveillance, and you don't need the banner.

No Cookies Also Means No Ads

The advertising model that dominates the modern web is, at its core, a tracking model. The ads are almost incidental — the real product is the data. You visit a site. A pixel fires. Your behaviour is logged, aggregated with data from a hundred other sites, and used to build a profile that's sold in a real-time auction before the page has even finished loading. The ad is just the bit you can see. The data collection is the bit that matters to the people doing it.

STEN will never run advertising. Not banner ads, not "sponsored content," not affiliate links that pay out when you buy something we've recommended. Not because we're judging every website that does — running a website costs money, and everyone has to make choices — but because it's entirely contrary to the point of this project.

We built this site to document the fight against exactly this kind of thing. The moment we stick a leaderboard ad in the sidebar we have, with some finality, lost the plot.

What Does Happen When You Visit?

Your browser makes a request to our server. Our server sends back some files. Your browser displays them. The server log — the standard Nginx access log — will contain your IP address, the date and time, and what file you requested. This is true of every web server on the planet and is the basic plumbing of how HTTP works.

We don't do anything with those logs beyond monitoring for errors and the occasional check that the server is still alive. We're not piping them into an analytics platform. We're not correlating them with other data sources. After a short retention period, they roll off.

That's the whole story. There is no part two. There is no "but actually" hidden in the small print.

A Brief Word About Cookie Banners

Cookie consent banners were introduced as a result of the EU's ePrivacy Directive and the GDPR, with the intention of giving users meaningful control over their data. In practice, what we got was a dark-pattern arms race in which the "Accept All" button is bright green and large, the "Reject All" option requires a law degree to locate, and the interface is deliberately designed to make consent feel like the path of least resistance.

Research consistently shows that the vast majority of users click "Accept All" not because they want to be tracked, but because they want the banner to go away so they can read the thing they came to read. This is not informed consent. This is attrition. The regulation intended to protect users ended up providing cover for exactly the behaviour it was meant to curtail, because the companies implementing it had no incentive to make rejection easy.

The cleanest solution — and the one that actually respects the spirit of the law, rather than just the letter of it — is to not collect the data in the first place. No data collection, no consent required, no banner needed. It really is that simple.

We Will Not Be Enshittified

This is a promise. Not a soft corporate "commitment" that'll be quietly retired when the Series A comes in. A genuine promise, made in public, on a site whose entire premise is that this kind of thing matters.

STEN.UK will not run ads. Will not install tracking. Will not sell data, because there is no data to sell. Will not introduce a freemium tier for the experience of reading text without a banner over it. Will not tell you to "keep it going." Will not ask you to rate us five stars. Will not pop up after three seconds asking for your email address.

You came here to read something. So we'll just let you read it.

Questions? If you have any questions about this policy — or want to point out something we've missed — get in touch. We're happy to discuss it.

Last updated: April 2025 · This page contains no cookies, trackers, analytics, or irony.