Cookie Policy

The short version.

This site has two halves, and they are governed by two different promises.

On the public pages, before you sign in, we count how the site is being used. Which pages get read, where visits come from, how far people get through joining. It is aggregate, it never follows you off this site, it never triggers anybody contacting you, and there is a one click switch on every page to turn it off. No banner, because there is nothing here we need your permission for and a banner asking for permission we do not need would be theatre.

The moment you have an account, the counting stops. That is true of A Place to Land and equally true of In My Room. Inside either space nothing is measured at all. Not what you open, not how long you stay, not how often you come back. The only cookies there are the ones that keep you signed in. And the counting identifier from the public pages is thrown away when your account is created, so nothing we counted before is ever attached to your name.

No advertising. No tracking pixels. No cross site tracking. No session recording. No third party fonts. Nobody follows you anywhere.

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1. What a cookie is

A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to keep, so that the site can recognise your browser next time. Similar technologies do the same job by other means, including local storage and session storage in your browser. Where this policy says "cookie" it means all of them.

2. The law, and the position we have taken

Cookies in the UK are governed by the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, usually called PECR, alongside UK GDPR.

The general rule is that you must be told about anything stored on your device and must consent to it, unless it is strictly necessary to provide the service you asked for.

The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 changed this, and the changes came into force on 5 February 2026. It inserted a new Schedule A1 into PECR, and paragraph 5 of that Schedule creates an exception for statistical purposes. In short, a site may store and read information on your device in order to count how its own service is being used, with a view to making it better, without asking for consent, provided that:

• the counting is about its own site and nothing else
• the information is not passed to anybody except to help improve that same site
• you are given clear and comprehensive information about it, which is what this section is
• you are given a simple, free way to object, and you have not objected

That is the basis we rely on for the public pages. There are limits built into it, and we meet them: the exception does not permit advertising, it does not permit following people across different sites, it does not permit identifying or profiling individuals, and it does not permit using what is collected to make a decision about anybody. We do none of those things, and section 3 sets out what we do instead.

We are relying on this deliberately, having previously said we would not. An earlier draft of this policy said we would rather not know anything at all. On reflection, the honest position is that Teri needs to know whether the public pages actually explain this well enough for the people who need it, and counting who reaches which page is the only way to find that out. What matters is where the counting stops, and it stops at your account.

3. The public pages

What is counted

How it is stored. Two small things, and nothing else.

The individual level records behind the totals are discarded once they have been counted, and in any event within [TO CONFIRM with KBI]. The counting identifier is used for counting and nothing else.

What we do not do

• Nothing follows you off this site. No advertising or social media pixels, including Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Google Ads. No advertising networks. No retargeting. No cross site tracking of any kind.
• We do not use Google Analytics.
• Nothing records your screen. No session replay, no mouse tracking, no scroll or keystroke capture, no heat mapping of individuals.
• Nothing builds a picture of you. No profile, no score, no inference about who you are or what you might need.
• Nothing here ever causes anybody to contact you. If you change your mind at the payment page, nobody will chase you. There is no basket sitting somewhere with your name on it, and nothing on your device tells us who stopped. We do see, from Stripe's own transaction records rather than from anything here, a simple total of payments begun and not completed, and section 6 explains that. It is a number, not a list.
• No chat widget, and no fonts loaded from a third party server, because that would hand your address to somebody else. Our typeface is served from our own domain.

How to say no. There is a link on every public page that switches the counting off, free and in one click. From then on nothing is counted. The one thing we do keep is a small record that you objected, so that we stop and so that we never have to bother you about it again, and it is in the table above. We do not rely on your browser settings to guess what you want, because guessing is not the same as asking.

4. Where the counting stops

This is the part worth reading twice, because it is the whole design.

The measurement described in section 3 applies only to the public pages. Once you have an account it stops completely. Inside A Place to Land, inside In My Room, and inside either Village community, there is:

• no page view counting
• no session recording
• no heat mapping
• no funnel or drop off measurement
• no timing of how long you spent anywhere
• no counting of how often you came back, or when

Nobody is watching how long you sat with a blank page before you started writing.

This matters most in In My Room. A young person's space is measured even less than an adult's, because there is nothing to measure: no counting, no ranking, no algorithm deciding what they see more of, and nothing anywhere that learns what a thirteen year old is upset about. Posts in their community appear in the order they were written and nothing else.

And the two halves are never joined. The counting identifier is discarded the moment you create your account, which is the first moment you become a named person to us rather than a number. It is never linked to your account, before or after. Nothing you read before you decided to trust us is ever attached to your name.

Because payment happens before your account exists, we are being precise about the order deliberately: you pay, you create your account, and it is at that second step, not at some later sign in, that the counting stops and the identifier goes.

5. Once you sign in

Signing in requires a small number of cookies. Each one is strictly necessary, which means the law does not require us to ask your consent for it, but we would rather list them anyway.

Your accessibility preference. If you change how the space looks or reads, we remember that choice in your browser so you do not have to set it every time. That one is not strictly necessary, so there is a switch in your account to turn it off, and turning it off simply means the space forgets each time.

6. When you pay

Payment is taken by Stripe, and we send you to Stripe's own checkout page to do it rather than embedding their payment form in ours. That is deliberate: it means Stripe's cookies are set on Stripe's page, at the moment you choose to pay, and not on our pricing page while you are still deciding.

On that page, Stripe sets cookies of its own to process the payment and to run the fraud checks that stop stolen cards being used. Stripe is a controller in its own right for that, and its own policy applies. It is at stripe.com/privacy, and its cookie information is at stripe.com/cookies-policy/legal.

We do not receive Stripe's cookies and we cannot read them. Where we can see that some payments were begun and not finished, that comes from Stripe's own records of the transaction, as a total. It is not a cookie on your device and it does not tell us who you are.

7. Voice notes and downloads

Voice recordings and downloadable resources are held in a private store and served to you through links that expire. Those links are not cookies and do not track you. They exist so that a file cannot be reached by anybody who has not signed in as you.

8. Managing cookies yourself

The one click switch in section 3 is the simplest way to stop the counting. Beyond that, you can block or delete cookies in your browser settings, and every major browser lets you do it. Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge each keep this under settings, usually under Privacy.

If you block the strictly necessary cookies listed in section 5, the space will not be able to keep you signed in, so you will not be able to use it.

Because nothing here follows you off this site, there is nothing for a "do not track" signal or an ad blocker to switch off beyond the counting itself.

9. If any of this changes

There is no advertising or retargeting on this site today, and none is running. If we ever introduce any, it falls outside the exception in section 2 entirely and would need your consent, not merely a chance to object. So you would see a proper choice before anything was set, saying no would be exactly as easy as saying yes, this policy and the [Privacy Notice] would be reissued first, and we would not do it quietly.

The same goes for anything else that stores information on your device: the version and date at the top change before it goes live, not afterwards.

What will not change is section 4. The private space stays unmeasured.

10. Getting in touch

Write to privacy@thetrueself.me, or to Teri Potter t/a The True Self, c/o TWP Accounting, The Old Rectory, Church Street, Weybridge, Surrey KT13 8DE.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a question about your information, you can complain to us at thetrueself.me/complaint, and then to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

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The True Self · Cookie Policy · Version 3.0 · [DATE] Related documents: [Privacy Notice] · [In My Room Privacy Notice] · [Terms of Use] · [Safeguarding Policy]