This page describes how the Franco-British Data Society uses cookies on www.francobritishdatasociety.org, in accordance with the UK Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR).
Summary
This website uses only strictly necessary cookies required to operate core features such as the members area and to protect against fraud. We do not use analytics, advertising, social-media tracking, or third-party profiling cookies. Because no non-essential cookies are set, no consent banner is displayed.
What are cookies?
Cookies are small text files that a website places on your device when you visit it. They allow the site to remember your actions and preferences (such as a logged-in session) over a period of time, so you do not have to re-enter them each time you return.
Cookies we use
The Franco-British Data Society sets the following cookies on this website. All of them are classified as strictly necessary under the ICO guidance on cookies, and none are used for tracking, analytics, advertising, or profiling.
1. Ghost — content and membership platform
Our website is built on the open-source Ghost publishing platform, hosted in the United Kingdom. Ghost sets first-party cookies that are required to operate the members area:
ghost-members-ssr— remembers a logged-in member across pages (server-side session). Set only after a member signs in via the magic link sent by email. Lifetime: 6 months.ghost-members-ssr.sig— cryptographic signature that protects the session cookie above from tampering. Same lifetime as the session cookie.
If you never sign up or sign in, Ghost does not set any cookie on your device. See the Ghost privacy policy for details.
2. Stripe — payment fraud prevention
Our future paid memberships will be processed by Stripe, a regulated payment service provider (Stripe Payments UK Limited, FCA registered). The Stripe library loads on every page of our site so that the payment form is ready instantly when you choose to subscribe. Stripe uses two cookies for fraud prevention only:
__stripe_mid— a randomly generated machine identifier used by Stripe’s anti-fraud systems. Lifetime: 1 year.__stripe_sid— a randomly generated session identifier used to detect suspicious patterns within a single visit. Lifetime: 30 minutes.
These cookies do not contain any personal information and are not used for advertising or analytics. The ICO and EDPB consider fraud-prevention cookies on transactional pages to be strictly necessary. See the Stripe cookie policy for details.
Cookies we do not use
To be transparent, this website does not set any of the following commonly found cookies:
- No analytics cookies (Google Analytics, Plausible, Matomo, Fathom, etc.)
- No advertising or remarketing cookies (Google Ads, Meta Pixel, LinkedIn Insight, etc.)
- No social-media tracking cookies (no third-party social embeds on our pages)
- No video-platform cookies (no embedded YouTube or Vimeo players)
- No content-delivery cookies set by font or icon providers (we use locally hosted SVG icons and the open Google Fonts CSS endpoint, which does not set cookies)
How to disable cookies
Because we only use strictly necessary cookies, disabling them may prevent you from signing in to your member account or completing a payment. You can manage cookies in your browser at any time:
If we add new cookies
If we ever introduce non-essential cookies in the future (for example analytics or marketing), we will display a consent banner and update this page accordingly before any such cookie is set on your device.
Contact
For any question about this Cookie Policy or about how the Franco-British Data Society handles your personal data, please contact our Secretary at secretary@francobritishdatasociety.org.
Last updated: 9 May 2026.