Cookie policy

The short version

Nothing that tracks you runs until you agree to it. When you first arrive you get a banner with a plain choice: accept, reject, or pick category by category. Reject is exactly as easy as accept, and if you ignore the banner entirely we treat that as a no.

Changed your mind? You don't need to email anyone or hunt through settings:

Change your cookie settings

What a cookie actually is

A small file a website asks your browser to keep. Some are genuinely useful: they remember you're signed in, or what you chose on a banner like ours. Others exist to follow you between sites and report back. Under UK law we need your permission before setting the second kind, and we need to tell you about the first.

Strictly necessary: always on

These do not track you and cannot be switched off, because without them the site either breaks or forgets something it has to remember. There are very few of them.

• Your cookie choice. One cookie storing what you picked here, so we don't ask again on every page. It holds your categories and the date you chose them, nothing else. It lasts six months, after which we'll check the answer is still right.
• Security and delivery. Our host may set short-lived cookies to serve pages and protect against abuse.

We also use Vercel Analytics, which counts page views and measures loading speed without cookies and without identifying anyone. Because it stores nothing on your device and cannot single you out, it runs without needing consent.

Analytics: only with your permission

These tell us how the site is actually used, so we spend our time improving the pages people struggle with rather than guessing.

• Google Analytics 4, for which pages get read, how people arrive, and where they give up.
• Hotjar, for anonymised patterns of scrolling and clicking, which shows us where a page confuses people.

If you say no, these are not loaded at all. Not loaded and told to behave: never requested, so nothing about your visit reaches them.

We're setting these tools up now, so the exact cookie names and durations will be listed here before they go live.

Marketing: only with your permission

Used to measure whether our advertising reaches founders who need us, and to avoid showing you the same advert over and over. These are the ones that can follow you to other websites, which is exactly why they are off unless you turn them on.

Controlling cookies yourself

The button above is the quickest route for this site. Beyond that, every major browser lets you block or delete cookies for any site, and most offer a “do not track” setting. You'll find these under privacy or security settings in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge.

Blocking the strictly necessary ones is allowed but will make parts of the site behave oddly, including forgetting the choice you made here.

Asking us about this

If something here isn't clear, or you think we've got it wrong, please get in touch. For how we handle personal information generally, see our privacy policy, or the University of Lincoln's privacy notices.

Last reviewed: 6 August 2026.