1. What cookies are
Cookies are small text files that a website may place on your device when you visit. They are used to store small pieces of information that the site can read back on subsequent requests. This policy explains which cookies and similar storage mechanisms (such as localStorage) the alphabell Site may use, and for what purpose.
2. Cookie categories
We follow the four-category framework familiar to most users of the EU cookie regime:
- Strictly necessary. Required for the Site to function — CSRF protection, session continuity for authenticated actions, recording your consent choices. Cannot be turned off via the consent banner.
- Preferences. Remember choices you have made (theme, locale, etc.) to improve your experience. Set only after consent.
- Analytics / performance. Help us understand aggregate Site usage. We default to cookie-less Plausible analytics; cookie-based analytics are set only after consent.
- Marketing. We do not run advertising or marketing-pixel cookies and have no plans to.
3. Cookies we may set
The full list of cookies that the Site or its embedded analytics may set is below. Some cookies are present only when the relevant feature is in use (e.g. careers_session appears only during the careers application flow).
| Name | Purpose | Duration | Category | Party |
|---|---|---|---|---|
_ga | Google Analytics — distinguishes unique users. Set only if Google Analytics is enabled (off by default at the Site level). | 2 years | Analytics | Google (third party) |
_gid | Google Analytics — short-term user distinction for daily reporting. Same enablement condition as _ga. | 24 hours | Analytics | Google (third party) |
plausible_session | Plausible Analytics session anchor for aggregate, privacy-respecting page-view measurement. No identifier persists beyond the session. | 30 minutes (session) | Analytics | Plausible (third party, EU-hosted) |
cookie_consent | Records your choice on the consent banner so that we do not ask again on every visit. | 12 months | Strictly necessary | alphabell (first party) |
csrf_token | Cross-site request forgery token for form submissions (contact form, newsletter signup, careers application). | Session | Strictly necessary | alphabell (first party) |
theme_preference | Records your light/dark mode preference. Where supported, we use localStorage instead of a cookie; the cookie variant is set only when localStorage is unavailable. | 1 year | Preferences | alphabell (first party) |
locale | Records your preferred display language for parts of the Site that have localised text (e.g. the Impressum). | 1 year | Preferences | alphabell (first party) |
careers_session | Maintains the state of an in-progress careers application across page reloads, including reference uploads and partial responses. | Session | Strictly necessary | alphabell (first party) |
newsletter_token | Verifies that an unsubscribe or preference-update request originates from the email recipient who received the relevant link. | 30 days | Strictly necessary | alphabell (first party) |
abtest_bucket | Assigns you to an A/B test cohort for layout or copy experiments on the public Site (e.g. variations of the careers index page). No personal data; only a bucket identifier. | 30 days | Analytics / performance | alphabell (first party) |
4. How to manage cookies
You can manage cookies through the Site's consent banner — which appears on first visit and can be re-opened from the "Cookie preferences" link in the footer — and through your browser's built-in controls. The major browsers provide controls to view, accept, refuse, and delete cookies; the relevant settings pages are:
- Chrome:
chrome://settings/cookies - Safari: Settings → Privacy → Manage Website Data
- Firefox:
about:preferences#privacy - Edge:
edge://settings/content/cookies
Blocking strictly-necessary cookies will impair core functionality of the Site (forms will fail, consent state will not persist, the in-progress careers application flow cannot complete). Blocking preference or analytics cookies has no functional impact on browsing.
5. Third-party cookie policies
- Plausible: plausible.io/privacy-focused-web-analytics
- Google Analytics: policies.google.com/privacy
- Cloudflare (where used for CDN / edge TLS): cloudflare.com/privacypolicy
6. Changes to this policy
We update this policy when we change the cookies we use. The version number and last-updated date below are incremented on any substantive change.
Version 2.0 · Last updated 2026-05-17.