Cookies

Two categories, two regimes

Cookies strictly necessary to run the site are set without your agreement, as the law allows. Everything else, audience measurement included, is set only after you consent, and you can withdraw that consent at any time.

Starshine sells no browsing data. It does use one advertising cookie, Meta’s, described below: it is set only if you accept it.

Strictly necessary cookies

• Session: they keep you signed in from page to page. Without them you would re-authenticate on every click.
• Language preference: it remembers the interface language you chose, so we do not ask again.
• Time zone: your browser tells us which time zone you are reading in, so the times on screen are yours and not the ones on our servers. That is all it does.
• Consent choice: it records your decision about measurement cookies, precisely so it is not asked on every visit.

These cannot be refused from the site. Your browser can block them, but blocking session cookies makes signing in impossible: the site stays readable, you can no longer identify yourself.

Audience measurement and advertising cookies

They help us understand how the site is used (which pages are viewed, where visitors come from) in order to improve it, and they measure how well our ads work. They are set only if you accept them.

One tool is in place: the Meta pixel, provided by Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, which runs Facebook and Instagram. It lets us know how many people who arrived from an ad go on to create an account, and so avoid spending blindly.

• _fbp: a random identifier given to your browser, kept for three months.
• _fbc: set only if you arrive by clicking one of our ads, it records which one. Kept for three months.

Two things are sent to Meta while this cookie is active: which Starshine pages you view, and the fact that a sign-up happened. Never your name, your email address, or anything you publish.

Meta acts here as a joint controller and hosts this data outside the European Union, transfers being covered by the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses. If you refuse, the script is never loaded at all and nothing is sent.

Payment

The payment provider sets its own cookies during a purchase, notably for fraud detection. They are necessary to the transaction and covered by its own policy.

Changing your choice

You can change your mind at any time, from your account settings, or from the footer if you have no account. Refusing is as easy as accepting.

Refusing takes effect immediately: the page reloads without the script, which is then never run. A script already loaded cannot remove itself, so this is the only honest way to hold your choice.