There is no cookie banner, and that is not an oversight
Proofavo sets one kind of cookie: the one that keeps you signed in. It is strictly necessary to provide a service you asked for, which is the exemption the ePrivacy rules were written around. There is nothing optional to consent to, so asking would be theatre.
We do measure which pages of our own site and application get used. That measurement stores nothing in your browser unless you ask it to — no cookie, no identifier, nothing that would let anyone recognise you. Consent under the ePrivacy rules is about reading and writing on your device, and nothing is read or written. How the counting works instead is described below, because "we don't use cookies" is a sentence people have learned to distrust and the honest version needs the mechanism.
The single exception is the one entry that records your having said no. If you turn measurement off at proofavo.com/analytics, that choice has to be kept somewhere or it would last one page. It is kept on your device, it says nothing except "not this browser", and it exists only for people who asked for it.
There is one place on the site where you can choose to let a third party in: the video on the home page. It is a picture until you press play, and says under it that it plays from YouTube. Pressing play is that choice — see The video on the home page below.
If anything else ever changes — a cookie that follows you, an advertising pixel, anything stored on your device that is not the session — this page changes first and a banner appears with it.
What is actually stored
| What | Kind | Why | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|---|
| Authentication session | cookie | keeps you signed in between pages | until you sign out or it expires |
| Dismissed plan-limit notice | sessionStorage |
so a notice you closed stays closed | until you close the tab |
| Recently archived proof | sessionStorage |
so "undo" can appear for a few seconds | seconds, then removed |
| Measurement turned off | localStorage |
so a browser you excluded stays excluded | until you turn it back on or clear your browsing data |
The sessionStorage entries never leave your browser, are not sent to us, and
disappear when the tab closes. The last row is written only if you turn
measurement off yourself; it is the only long-lived thing on this list besides
the session cookie, and it exists to remember a "no". They are listed here
because a complete list is the only kind worth publishing.
How the measurement works without storing anything
We use PostHog, on their EU cloud in Frankfurt, configured so that it cannot store anything on your device.
Instead of giving your browser an identifier to carry, PostHog counts visitors on their own servers: it takes your IP address, your browser's user-agent string and the site's hostname, and hashes them together with a random value that changes every day and is then thrown away. The result cannot be turned back into an IP address, cannot be matched against another site's version of the same person, and stops working as an identifier at midnight. That is the whole mechanism.
Two consequences worth stating plainly, because they are the price of it:
- we cannot tell that today's visitor is yesterday's, and do not try to;
- we cannot follow anyone from this site to any other, and could not if we wanted to.
Your browser also never contacts PostHog directly. The measurement is sent to
proofavo.com and forwarded from our own server, so no third-party origin is
contacted from the page at all.
Where you are, to the nearest country. Each measurement carries a two-letter
country code — HU, DE — and it is not looked up from your IP address by
anyone. Your browser tells every site it loads which time zone it is set to and
which languages you read; the country is worked out from that inside your
browser, and only the country is sent. The time zone and the language are used
and thrown away, because either of them narrows a person down further than the
country does.
It is deliberately imprecise, and the imprecision is the point: it says where your computer's clock is set, not where you are. If you are working abroad for the week it will say so. There is nothing finer behind it — no city, no region, no coordinates — and nothing finer can be derived from what we hold. It exists to answer one question, which is which countries the product has reached.
Reviewers are excluded entirely. If you arrived here through a review link someone sent you, none of the above applies to you: the measurement code is not merely disabled on those pages, it is never sent to your browser. Nothing about your visit is measured. The only thing recorded is whether and when the link was opened, which is shown to the shop that sent it, and is stored with the proof rather than in your browser.
Also excluded: the pages for unsubscribing from our mailing list, and the ones for resetting a password or confirming an address. Somebody asking to be left alone should not be counted for it.
Turning it off
proofavo.com/analytics — one button, no account needed, effective immediately.
It applies to the browser you press it in, because that is the only place the answer can be kept when nothing else about you is stored. Each browser and device asks separately, and clearing your browsing data forgets the choice.
Visiting that page is itself not counted. A pageview would otherwise arrive before you could press anything, which would make the page a poor joke.
The video on the home page
The short product video on proofavo.com is hosted on YouTube. Until you press play it is only a picture served from our own site: your browser does not contact YouTube or Google, and nothing is stored.
Pressing play loads YouTube's player from youtube-nocookie.com, Google's
privacy-enhanced embed. From that moment your browser is talking to Google
directly, which receives your IP address and the fact that the video was played
on proofavo.com, and the player may store data on your device — in the
browser's local storage rather than as a cookie — for as long as Google keeps
it there. That is Google's processing under Google's own privacy policy
(https://policies.google.com/privacy), not ours, which is why the page tells
you before you press rather than after.
We record that play was pressed, as one of the named actions described above, and nothing about what happens inside the player. If you would rather not, the link under the video opens the same film on YouTube itself, or you can simply leave it as a picture.
What we do not use
- No analytics or measurement cookies, and no analytics storage in your browser beyond the one entry that records your having opted out.
- No advertising or retargeting.
- No third-party cookies of any kind, and no third-party content that loads before you ask for it.
- No fingerprinting, and no session recording or screen replay — neither for measurement nor for error reports.