Cookie Policy
Effective July 26, 2026 · last updated July 26, 2026
This page lists what recentbreaches.com actually loads. It is a short list, because this is a news site with no accounts and no shopping cart.
How consent works here
Nothing optional loads before you choose. Analytics and advertising tags are held back and only injected into the page once you grant the matching category. If our consent script fails to run, the tags simply never load — the page still works.
We show the consent banner unless every signal available to us says you are confidently outside the EEA, the UK and Switzerland. If we cannot tell — a VPN, a Tor exit, an unresolved country — we ask. Where we can tell you are outside those regions, analytics and advertising are enabled by default and you can turn them off at any time from Cookie settings in the footer.
We honour the Global Privacy Control signal. If your browser sends it, we load no analytics or advertising tags, regardless of where you are.
What is set, and by whom
| Set by | Category | What it does | Typical lifetime |
|---|---|---|---|
Recent Breaches (rb_consent) | Strictly necessary | Remembers your cookie choice so we do not ask again and so we know which tags may load. First-party. | 12 months |
Recent Breaches (rb-theme) | Strictly necessary | Remembers your colour theme. Stored in local storage, first-party, never sent to us. | Until cleared |
Cloudflare (__cf_bm, cf_clearance) | Strictly necessary | Bot management, abuse protection and traffic routing for the site. Set for security, not for tracking. | 30 minutes – 12 months |
PostHog (ph_*) | Analytics — consent required | Pseudonymous device and session identifiers so we can see which stories get read, measure performance, and record masked session replays. Text inputs are masked. | Up to 12 months |
Google AdSense / DoubleClick (__gads, __gpi, IDE, test_cookie) | Advertising — consent required | Selects and measures the ads on this site, limits how often you see the same ad, and detects invalid traffic. Loaded from googlesyndication.com and doubleclick.net. | Up to 13–24 months |
How to change your mind or opt out
On this site:
The same controls are always available from Cookie settings in the footer, and the CCPA opt-out lives at Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information.
Elsewhere:
- Turn on Global Privacy Control in your browser or via an extension — we honour it automatically (globalprivacycontrol.org).
- Manage Google’s ad personalisation at myadcenter.google.com, and see how Google uses data from sites that use its services at policies.google.com.
- Industry opt-outs: YourAdChoices (DAA), NAI, and Your Online Choices (EU).
- Opt out of PostHog by rejecting analytics above, or by enabling your browser’s Do Not Track / GPC setting.
- Block or delete cookies in your browser settings. Blocking strictly necessary cookies may break parts of the site.
Other technologies
We use local storage for your theme choice and a copy of your consent choice; neither is transmitted to us. We do not use fingerprinting, and we do not run tracking pixels in our newsletter beyond the standard open/click measurement our email provider performs.
Our embeddable widgets, when placed on someone else’s site, set no cookies of their own. They call our API and record only the embedding domain.
Contact
Questions about cookies or tracking on this site: press@recentbreaches.com. See also our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.