Nothing loads until you say yes

Until this week, Google Analytics and AdSense ran on first paint of every page here. They set their cookies before anyone had been asked anything. That is the case the GDPR and the UK PECR require prior opt-in for, and no amount of policy text fixes it while the script has already run.

So the tags are gone from the markup. Nothing third-party loads now until you say it can.

There is a privacy policy, and it is specific. It lives at /privacy/ and names the actual third parties these pages load, what each one does, how long anything is kept, and how to have it erased. It is versioned exactly like the Terms of Sale: every version keeps a permanent dated URL carrying its own SHA-256, so you can show what it said on the day you used the site. Changing it means publishing a new version, not editing the old one.

Declining costs you nothing. This is the part worth stating plainly, because consent banners usually make refusing feel expensive. It is not. Decline and the site behaves identically — every name, every price, every way to buy. There is no degraded mode, no nag on the next page, and no second ask.

No JavaScript means no vendors at all. The gate is a script. If you block it, nothing it would have loaded loads either. That is the correct outcome rather than a broken one: there is nothing to consent to when nothing can run.

Changing your mind actually changes something. "Cookie settings" sits in the footer of every page. Withdrawing consent after granting it reloads the page — deliberately. Nothing a page can call un-injects a third-party script it has already handed the document to, so recording a refusal and carrying on would have logged a decision the page went on ignoring. The reload is the honest version.

Global Privacy Control is honoured. If your browser sends the signal, that is treated as a refusal everywhere: nothing loads, and you are not asked. Your stored choice is left alone rather than overwritten, so turning the signal off restores whatever you had actually chosen.

The question covers the whole site. Your answer is stored once, so the banner names every vendor that answer will end up permitting — not just the ones on the page you happen to be reading. Our 404 page carries analytics and no advertising, but saying yes there is the same yes the catalog reads before it loads an ad. Asking about only half of that would have been consent collected for something we had not mentioned.

Rights requests reach a person. Access, correction, erasure, or objection: write to privacy@namegarage.com and a person answers within 30 days. It is a real mailbox, not a form that files things away.

None of this is generous. It is the floor, and the site was below it. It isn't any more.