1. Cookies, and the other things a site can store
A cookie is a small piece of text a website asks your browser to keep and send back on every later visit. Cookies are the technology most people have heard of, but they are not the only way a site can remember something.
Browsers also offer local storage, which keeps information on your device until it is deleted, and session storage, which is emptied the moment you close the tab. Unlike cookies, neither of these is automatically sent to a server with every request; they stay on your device until the page itself reads them.
The distinction matters here, because Love in Babylon uses the second kind and not the first. We describe both below so you have the full picture rather than a technically true but incomplete answer.
2. What Love in Babylon actually uses today
Love in Babylon sets no cookies at all. Not when you browse the public pages, not when you apply, and not when you sign in. We checked this by inspecting the browser directly, signed out and signed in, rather than assuming it.
What we do use is a small amount of strictly necessary browser storage, described in the next two sections. All of it is essential to the service working: keeping you signed in, remembering the preferences you set, and returning you to the right place on a page.
- Cookies set by Love in Babylon: none.
- Third-party cookies: none.
- Analytics, advertising, tracking pixels, session recording or A/B testing: none, in any form.
- Strictly necessary browser storage: yes; this is the only category we use.
3. Keeping you signed in
When you sign in successfully, your browser stores a single entry containing your sign-in session. It is created only by signing in, and it is what allows you to move between your rooms, your Table for Two and your settings without typing your password on every page.
That entry holds a short-lived access token, which expires roughly an hour after it is issued, and a longer-lived renewal token used to quietly refresh it while you remain signed in. Refreshing is automatic; you will not notice it happen.
This is strictly necessary storage. It exists for one purpose, proving to our servers that a request is genuinely from you, and it is never used to profile you, follow you between sites, or build advertising audiences. It is not shared with anyone.
Signing out removes it from your browser and ends the session on our servers. It is also removed if you clear your browser's site data.
4. Preferences and page behaviour
A small number of additional entries are kept on your device to make the interface behave sensibly. These stay on your device only. They contain no identifiers, are never sent to our servers as tracking, and are not readable by anyone else.
- Small interface preferences you set inside the app, such as display choices and which items you have already dismissed. These stay on your device and are never sent to us.
- Safety preferences you choose in the Safety Centre.
- A short-lived note of your scroll position, so returning to a page does not throw you back to the top. This one is cleared automatically when you close the tab.
5. Third parties
The typefaces used across the site are loaded from Google Fonts. That is the only request the site makes to anyone outside Love in Babylon, and it sets no cookies. Loading a font does involve your browser contacting Google's font servers, which necessarily reveals your IP address to them, as it would for any website using a hosted typeface.
When you pay for membership we send you to Paystack's own checkout page to enter your card details. That page is Paystack's website, not ours, and it will use its own cookies under its own notice. Nothing from Paystack is embedded in Love in Babylon, and no payment widget or script runs on our pages.
There are no embedded videos, maps, comment widgets, chat widgets, social buttons, share pixels or advertising partners anywhere in the product. Nothing on this site loads content from a social network, and nothing reports your activity to one.
6. We do not track you
We want to be unusually plain about this, because almost every site says something softer. Love in Babylon runs no analytics product, no telemetry, no heatmaps, no session replay, no conversion pixels and no advertising technology. We do not measure your journey through the site, and we could not sell or share such data because we do not collect it.
Our servers keep ordinary technical logs of requests, as any hosted service must, in order to keep the service running and to investigate abuse or faults. Those are server-side records, not browser storage, and they are covered by the Privacy Policy rather than this page.
If this ever changes (and it would only change for something like understanding which parts of the product members actually find useful), this page will be updated first, and anything non-essential will be switched off until you have actively chosen to allow it.
7. Controlling storage in your browser
Because we set no cookies, there is nothing here for a cookie blocker to block. You remain in full control of the storage we do use, through your browser rather than through a setting on our site.
Every major browser lets you view and delete site data for an individual site, clear everything on exit, or refuse storage from a site entirely. These controls live under Privacy or Site settings in your browser's preferences, and they work regardless of anything we do.
- Clearing this site's data signs you out immediately and forgets your interface preferences. Your account, profile, photos, conversations and history are untouched; they live on our servers, not in your browser.
- Blocking storage for this site entirely will prevent sign-in from working at all. There is no way around this: without somewhere to keep your session, every page would treat you as a stranger.
- Private or incognito browsing works normally, but signs you out when you close the window.
- Browsing the public pages (the home page, this policy, the Terms, the Privacy Policy and the Community Guidelines) requires no storage whatsoever.
8. Why there is no cookie banner
Consent banners exist so you can refuse cookies and similar storage that are not needed to deliver the service you asked for, chiefly analytics and advertising. Storage that is strictly necessary to provide a service you have actively requested, such as keeping you signed in after you have chosen to sign in, does not require consent under UK or EU rules.
Everything Love in Babylon stores falls into that strictly necessary category. There is nothing here for you to accept or reject, so asking you to click a banner would be theatre: it would imply a choice that does not exist and train you to dismiss a box without reading it.
So instead of a banner, you get this page. If we ever introduce anything non-essential, a genuine consent choice will appear before that technology is loaded; never afterwards, never pre-ticked, and refusing will be exactly as easy as agreeing.
9. Changes to this policy
This policy carries a version and a date at the top of the page. We will update it whenever what we store in your browser materially changes, and the version will change with it.
If a future change introduces anything beyond strictly necessary storage, we will update this page and put the consent choice in front of you before that technology runs for the first time.
10. Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you believe you have found storage this policy does not describe, we would genuinely like to know.
