KnowSips Privacy Policy: Data, Cookies and Analytics

The short version

Accounts

None. You cannot register, log in, or leave a comment.

Cookies we set

None of our own. Google’s analytics and advertising scripts store cookies on this domain.

What we ask you for

Nothing. Reading the site requires no details from you.

Advertising

Google display advertising. No affiliate tracking.

Selling data

Never. There is no data sale, and nothing to sell.

Third-party requests

One: Google’s analytics and advertising scripts, which see your IP address. Fonts and icons are served from this site.

If you read only one section, read third parties your browser contacts. It is the part most sites leave out, and on KnowSips it is the main thing that happens.

What we collect

KnowSips does not ask you for your name, your email address, or any other personal detail in order to read it. There is no sign-up form, no newsletter box, and no comment field.

Two things do reach us.

What you send on purpose

If you email the editors, we receive whatever you put in that message: your email address, your name if you sign it, and the content itself. We use it to reply and nothing else.

What the web server records automatically

Like any website, requests arrive at a web server and standard server logs may record:

• the address of the page requested, and the time of the request;
• the IP address the request came from;
• the browser and operating system reported by your device;
• the page that referred you, if your browser sent one.

These are operational records. They exist to keep the site running and to investigate faults or abuse, and they are not used to build a profile of you.

Cookies

A cookie is a small file a website stores on your device so it can remember something between page loads.

KnowSips sets no cookies of its own. There is no login to remember, no basket and no preference panel, so the site itself has nothing to store.

Google Analytics does set cookies. It stores two on this domain, named _ga and _ga_WNXWHGC2W8, which hold a randomly generated number so that repeat visits from the same browser are counted as one reader rather than several. They carry no name, no email address and nothing you have typed. Google's own privacy policy governs what it does with them, and clearing your browser's cookies removes them.

Google, which serves the advertising on this site, also sets cookies, and uses them to measure and to choose which advert you see.

Where the law requires it, you are asked before those cookies are set. That prompt is Google's own consent message rather than something we built: consent has to reach Google to mean anything, and a banner written here would not. Your answer is stored by that mechanism so you are not asked again on every page, and the Cookie choices link in the footer reopens it whenever you want to change it.

The site itself uses no local storage and no browser fingerprinting.

Third parties your browser contacts

KnowSips runs on Hostinger and uses Cloudflare to deliver and protect the site. These providers process requests containing your IP address, browser details and the requested URL so that they can serve the page.

Fonts and icons are served from KnowSips itself. We host copies of the typefaces and Phosphor icons locally, so displaying a page does not require your browser to contact Google Fonts or the unpkg delivery network.

The text, layout, photographs and navigation also load from this domain. Following a link to another website sends a separate request to that website.

One script does come from Google. Loading a page fetches Google's analytics and advertising scripts from googletagmanager.com and googlesyndication.com, which means Google receives your IP address, your browser details and the address of the page you are reading. What it does with that is covered by Google's privacy policy. Blocking that request in your browser costs you nothing here: every guide is served from our own server and reads the same without it.

Analytics

This site loads Google Analytics to count visits and see which guides people read. It tells us how many people opened a page and which guides get read, and we use that to decide what to write next and what to fix. It does not tell us who you are, and we do not try to find out: no name, no email address, no account, and nothing you type into the search box is sent to it.

The two cookies it stores are named in Cookies above, and you are not asked before they are set, which that section explains.

The tag is switched on by one setting, and it does not fire on a local development machine, so our own work on the site never reaches the reporting property.

What happens when you search

The search box sends your term to our own server, which matches it against the article text and returns results. The term is used to run that query and is not stored against you, not linked to an identifier, and not sent to any third party.

Your search term does appear in the page address while you are on the results page, which means it can end up in your own browser history and in our standard server logs alongside the request. If you would rather it did not, browse from the drinks index instead of searching.

How we use what we have

• To serve pages and keep them loading correctly.
• To investigate errors, broken links, and abuse.
• To reply to a message you chose to send us.

That is the complete list. We do not profile readers, personalise content, or measure you against other visitors.

Nothing on this site changes according to who is reading it. Two people opening the same guide at the same moment see the same page, in the same order, with the same links. There is no recommendation engine, no A/B test running against you, and no reason for the site to know anything about you in order to work.

Why we are allowed to hold it

If you are somewhere with data protection law of the European kind, the legal bases are these, and the list is short because the processing is:

Server logs

Legitimate interests: running the site, diagnosing faults, and defending it against abuse. A site cannot be operated or secured without a record of the requests made to it.

Email you send us

Legitimate interests, in answering a message you chose to send. We use your address to reply and for nothing else.

Measurement or advertising, where in use

Consent, gathered through the prompt described above, and withdrawable in the same place. Nothing of that kind runs before consent is given.

We do not rely on legitimate interests to justify tracking, profiling, or advertising. Where consent is the correct basis, consent is what we ask for.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control

Some browsers send a Do Not Track header or a Global Privacy Control signal to say you do not want to be tracked or to have personal information sold or shared.

The site behaves the same way whether you send one or not, because it does not track readers across sites and has nothing to sell or share in the first place. There is no setting here that a signal could usefully change.

Where a third-party service is in use, that service handles such signals under its own policy, which is linked in the section above. Blocking third-party requests in your browser is the more reliable control, and it costs you nothing on this site: the guides are served from our own server and do not depend on anyone else's script to be readable.

Sharing and selling

We do not sell personal information. There is no data broker, no affiliate tracker and no marketing list.

Advertising is the one exception to say plainly: Google serves the adverts on this site and receives technical information about your visit in order to do it, handled under Google's own privacy policy. We pass Google nothing about you ourselves, because we hold nothing about you to pass.

Information reaches other parties in only two ways. The first is the hosting provider that runs the server and therefore holds the server logs. The second is a lawful request from an authority with jurisdiction, which we would comply with only to the extent required.

How long anything is kept

Server logs

Kept only as long as they are useful for operating and securing the site, then rotated out by the host.

Email you send us

Kept while the matter is open, and after that only if it records a correction we made to an article.

Analytics

Visit counts sit in Google's systems under its own retention setting, not ours. We hold no copy and build no profile from them.

Anything else

There is nothing else. No marketing database, and no record that links a visit to a person.

Your choices and rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or restrict the use of personal information a site holds about you, and to object to certain processing.

Here is the honest practical position: KnowSips holds almost nothing about you. With no accounts and no tracking, there is usually no record tied to you at all beyond a server log line and any email you chose to send. If you contact us, we will tell you plainly what we have, and delete what we can.

Named in full, the rights people most often have are to be told what is held, to get a copy of it, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to how it is used, and to receive it in a portable form. On a site with no accounts, most of those resolve to the same short answer: there is a server log line and, if you wrote to us, your email. We will say so plainly rather than send you a form.

Requests go to the address at the foot of this page. We do not require you to prove your identity for a request we can answer without doing so, because asking for identification in order to confirm we hold nothing would collect more about you than we started with.

If you are not satisfied with how a request was handled, you can complain to the data protection authority for the country you live in. You do not need our permission to do that and you do not need to come to us first.

You can also reduce what reaches us without asking anyone: block third-party requests, use a private window, or browse rather than search.

Security

The site is served over an encrypted connection. Because there are no accounts, no payments, and no stored personal records, the amount of information that could be exposed is very small by design, which is the strongest protection available to a site like this.

No website can promise perfect security, and we do not.

Children

KnowSips is a general reference and is not directed at children. It does not knowingly collect information from anyone, of any age, beyond the server logs described above.

Visitors from outside our country

The site can be read from anywhere. A request you make will be handled by our hosting provider's servers and by the third-party services listed above, which may be located in a different country from you, with different data-protection law.

By using the site you accept that your request is handled in that way. Given how little is collected, the practical exposure includes request information processed by our hosting and delivery providers and the server logs described above.

Changes to this policy

If what the site does changes, this page changes in the same edit. A meaningful change moves the last reviewed date at the top, which is stored once and shown on every trust and legal page so the six cannot disagree.

We will not quietly add tracking and leave this page describing a site that no longer exists.

How to reach us

Privacy questions go to editors@knowsips.com, or through the contact page. Related reading: our terms of use and our disclaimer, which together set out what the site is and is not.