Cookie Policy

A small magazine sets a small number of cookies. This page explains the few we use, the ones we deliberately avoid, and what happens when an embedded video appears in a story.

Most of what you read on indianakorean.com is delivered without any tracking at all. We do not run advertising on this site, and we have not enabled third-party analytics. The cookies described below are the technical cookies that any modern WordPress publication needs to function — nothing more — together with the cookies that arrive when an embedded video plays in a story.

This document is a companion to our Privacy Policy. The privacy policy answers what information we hold and what we do with it; this cookie policy answers which small files your browser stores on our behalf, and why. Read together they describe the full data picture for a reader of this magazine.

i. What a cookie is, in two sentences

A cookie is a short text file that a website asks your browser to store, so the site can recognize the same browser on a later visit. Cookies vary widely: some last only for the duration of a single page view (session cookies); some persist for months or years (persistent cookies); some are set by the site you are visiting (first-party) and some by other companies whose code is embedded inside the page (third-party).

The same plain explanation applies to local storage and session storage — newer browser features that serve a similar purpose to cookies and are governed in this policy on the same terms.

ii. Our stance — minimal by default

We treat cookies the way a print magazine treats subscriber data: the smaller the file, the better. We have made three deliberate choices that should be visible to any reader who inspects the network tab on this site:

• No advertising network. We do not load Google AdSense, programmatic ad code, or any equivalent. The advertising cookies that account for the bulk of cookies on a typical news site are simply absent here.
• No third-party analytics, at this time. We have not enabled Google Analytics, Plausible, Fathom, or any equivalent product. Readership is measured by what we can read from the host server's own logs, which never leave the host's infrastructure.
• No consent banner — for now. Because we set no advertising or analytics cookies, the law does not require a consent prompt for our current stack in any of the jurisdictions where we publish, including Indiana, California, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. We will introduce a banner the moment we add anything that would require consent. We say more about this below.

iii. The cookies we set ourselves

The first-party cookies on this site come from two sources: the WordPress publishing platform that runs the magazine, and the SiteGround caching layer that delivers the pages. None of them carry an identifier that we cross-reference against a reader profile.

None of these cookies is used for tracking, profiling, advertising, or analytics. They are the cookies that allow the magazine to be edited, served, and commented on. They sit firmly within what European law calls the strictly necessary category and what Indiana's ICDPA simply leaves outside the scope of consumer-rights mechanics.

iv. Cookies from embedded videos and social posts

Some of our stories embed a YouTube video — a film clip we are quoting, or a home-tour video the piece is built around. When you load such a story, the YouTube player is loaded by your browser from YouTube's servers, not ours. To reduce the data YouTube can collect, we serve every embedded video through YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode (the youtube-nocookie.com domain). In that mode, YouTube is instructed not to set tracking cookies on your browser unless you press play and then watch a video on the YouTube site itself.

This is a meaningful improvement over a default YouTube embed, but it is not zero. Pressing play on an embedded video sends a request to YouTube's servers; that request alone discloses your IP address and the page you are watching from. We accept this trade because the alternative — refusing to let any reader watch a video without first clicking through a consent dialog — would harm the reading experience without changing the underlying mechanics meaningfully. If you would prefer not to make even that disclosure, you can simply not press play; the embed itself loads no tracking script until the play button is engaged.

The magazine does not embed Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, or Facebook posts on this site. If we ever do, we will list the platform here and explain its cookie behavior alongside the YouTube row above.

v. Analytics and advertising — what we do not run

To remove any ambiguity, the following categories of cookies are not in use on indianakorean.com as of the date at the top of this page:

• Advertising / retargeting cookies. No Google Ads, Meta Pixel, TikTok Pixel, X Pixel, or programmatic ad-network cookies. The site has no advertising business model.
• Third-party analytics cookies. No Google Analytics 4, no Adobe Analytics, no Plausible, no Fathom, no Matomo, no Hotjar, no Microsoft Clarity. Readership is read off the host's server logs only.
• Cross-site identity cookies. No identity-resolution cookies (LiveRamp, ID5, etc.) and no shared-ID frameworks.

If we add any of the above, this policy will be amended on the same day, the consent banner described in section ii will be turned on, and a notice will appear on the homepage and in the next newsletter issue.

vi. Your choices in the browser

Because the site does not run a consent banner today, the controls you have are the controls every browser ships with. Every modern browser allows you to:

• View the cookies a site has set on your browser, and delete any of them, from the privacy or storage section of the browser's settings.
• Block third-party cookies by default. Doing so does not break this site.
• Block all cookies for indianakorean.com. Doing so will not affect reading articles. The only thing that will stop working is the comment-name memory described in section iii.
• Send a Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal with your browser, or with an extension. We honor GPC as an opt-out signal under California law and treat it as a request to refrain from any future selling or sharing of your information for cross-context behavioral advertising — which we do not do today regardless.

The browser-vendor pages below are kept current and explain the controls in plain language: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge.

vii. Indiana ICDPA

The Indiana Consumer Data Protection Act (Indiana Code §§ 24-15-1 et seq.) gives Indiana residents rights to confirm whether a controller is processing their personal information, to access and correct it, to delete it, to obtain a portable copy, and to opt out of targeted advertising, sale of personal data, and certain forms of profiling. Because we do not run advertising, do not sell personal data, and do not profile readers, the practical scope of the opt-out rights is narrow on this site. The access, correction, deletion, and portability rights apply in full to the small set of data we hold (newsletter signups, contributor emails, and comment author lines). We respond to verifiable requests within forty-five days under the statute and do not charge a fee for a first request in a twelve-month period. Send any such request to the email below.

viii. California (CCPA / CPRA)

For California residents, the California Consumer Privacy Act (as amended by the CPRA) provides a parallel set of rights, including the right to know, to delete, to correct, to opt out of sale or sharing for cross-context behavioral advertising, and to limit the use of sensitive personal information. As stated above, we do not sell personal information, do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and do not collect categories of sensitive personal information beyond an email address voluntarily given for the newsletter. We honor a Global Privacy Control signal as an opt-out request. The same email below is the verified channel for any California request.

ix. European Union and United Kingdom

If you are reading from the European Union or the United Kingdom, the ePrivacy Directive (the so-called "cookie law," transposed into each member state's law and into the UK's PECR) and the GDPR apply in addition to U.S. law. The ePrivacy Directive permits the cookies in section iii without prior consent because they fall within the strictly-necessary exemption. The privacy-enhanced YouTube embed described in section iv loads no tracking cookie until the user presses play, which is consistent with regulators' current guidance on the threshold at which consent is required. If we ever add a non-essential cookie, a consent banner that meets the standards of the European Data Protection Board and the UK Information Commissioner's Office will appear before any such cookie is set. The lawful bases for the limited personal data we hold are described in our Privacy Policy.

x. Changes to this policy

We will update this policy whenever the cookie set on the site changes — most likely when we add an analytics product or a newsletter-tracking pixel — and whenever the law changes in a way that affects what we have to say here. The date at the top of the page will move forward, and a material change will be announced on the homepage and in the next newsletter issue. Earlier versions are kept on file and are available on request.

xi. How to reach us

For any cookie or privacy question, request, or correction:

• Email: admin@indianakorean.com
• Postal: Indiana Korean, c/o the Editor, Carmel, Indiana, USA. (Mail address provided on request to confirm receipt.)
• Indiana Attorney General complaint: in.gov/attorneygeneral