Cookies

What we do not do

No advertising cookies. No tracking pixels. No device fingerprinting. Nothing that follows you between sites or builds a profile of you.

You can read every page on this site — the map, the search, the trip planner, every water — without an account and without a cookie. You can report a mistake or add a water anonymously too, and that is the most useful thing anybody does here.

Five things do need an account, and signing in for them sets one cookie. They are listed below.

Signing in sets one cookie

Five things need an account: saving waters to a list of your own, keeping a record of the waters you have fished, adding a photograph, logging a catch, and looking after a club’s pages if you run a club.

If you sign in to do one of those, your browser is given a session cookie. It keeps you signed in between pages and does nothing else. It is not shared with anybody, it is not used to work out where you have been, and it goes when you sign out.

This is what the law calls a strictly necessary cookie: without it, signing in would not work at all. That is why there is no banner asking you to accept it — there is no version of “signed in” that does not need it.

Everything else on this site still sets nothing. Reading the site and contributing to it both work without an account and without a cookie. That is deliberate and it is not going to change.

Every cookie this site sets

Two, and only in situations you put yourself in. Neither is set for someone reading the site.

• Your sign-in session, if you create an account. It holds the token that keeps you signed in, so that your saved waters follow you rather than living in one browser. It is set when you sign in and cleared when you sign out. It identifies you to this site and to nothing else.
• A moderation key, if you sign in to moderate the site. It is limited to the moderation pages, cannot be read by page scripts, and expires after twelve hours. If you are not a moderator it is never set.

That is the complete list. If a third one ever appears, it will be named here first.

Why there is no cookie banner

Both cookies above are what the rules call strictly necessary: each one does the thing you asked for and nothing else. Neither is used to measure you, profile you, or follow you anywhere. A banner asking you to agree to them would be asking about something you cannot decline and still do what you came to do.

Nothing else is allowed to arrive alongside them. Analytics on this site is cookieless by rule, not by accident.

What is stored on your device

Two things, neither of them about you, and neither of them reaching us.

If you sketch a stretch on the map to suggest it, that shape is held in your browser’s session storage for the moment it takes you to move on to the form that describes it. It never leaves your device, we cannot read it, and it is gone when you close the tab.

If you filter the map, the filters go into the address bar — so that a filtered view is a link you can send to somebody. That puts them in your browser history, like any page you visit, and nowhere else.

Nothing else is kept. The map does not remember where you were looking, which water you opened, or that you have been here before. Every visit starts clean.

Analytics

We use Umami, a cookieless analytics product. It counts page views and a handful of actions — a report filed, a water submitted, a search that found nothing — with no cookies, no profile of you, and no way to follow you to another site. That is why this page has no consent banner.

Whatever we use will be cookieless. It will not set a cookie, will not use local storage to track you, will not fingerprint your device, and will not follow you to any other site. It counts pages, not people.

Map tiles and hosting

Map images are loaded from a third-party tile provider, which necessarily sees your IP address in order to send you the images — as does any site you load anything from, including this one. Details of waters are stored with Supabase, our database host, which also holds account emails.

More detail, including exactly what we keep and for how long, is in the privacy notice.