Cookies

Cookies are small text files that websites save in your browser so they can remember things between visits. There are several categories: strictly necessary cookies that make the site work, preference cookies that remember your choices, analytics cookies that count visits anonymously, and advertising cookies that track behaviour across sites. The last category we do not use at all.

Cookies have been part of the web since 1994 and most sites use them. The regulatory framework around them has tightened: Canadian privacy law requires meaningful consent for non-essential cookies, and the European Union's e-Privacy framework has similar rules. We treat these as a floor rather than a ceiling: we use fewer cookies than we are allowed to, not more.

winigreat.bet uses first-party cookies for site preferences (such as the layout you choose for comparison tables) and a privacy-respecting analytics cookie for aggregated page view counts. The analytics cookie does not identify you personally and is not shared with third parties outside the site. All cookies we set expire within 12 months, most sooner.

The specific first-party cookies we set are a session identifier for load balancing, a preference cookie that stores your choice of layout for comparison tables, and an anonymised analytics cookie. All of them expire within 12 months, most within a day or a week. None of them track you across other websites. None of them store personal data in the cookie itself; where a cookie contains an identifier, that identifier is a random string that resolves only on our server.

We use a self-hosted analytics setup rather than a third-party service. This means your reading activity is counted on our server and never passed to a company like Google. The data we see is limited to page views, country-level location, and anonymised referrer. We cannot see who you are or what you do once you leave our site.

The specific analytics software we use is Plausible, self-hosted on our own server. Plausible is designed to collect fewer data points than mainstream analytics tools and does not use personal identifiers. If you have an ad-blocker enabled, it will usually block Plausible as well; this is a false positive from the ad-blocker's perspective but it does no harm — our site works perfectly without analytics running.

The site does not set third-party cookies. If a cookie labelled with a third-party domain appears in your browser's inspector while you are reading one of our pages, it is from the operator's affiliate tracking link firing after you clicked a button; it is not something we set, and clearing it has no effect on your browsing of our site. You can block third-party cookies entirely in your browser settings without breaking anything on our pages.