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Cookie Policy

What a cookie actually is

A cookie is a short text file that a website asks your browser to keep and to hand back on later requests. Most of the ones involved here hold a random string and nothing else. That string lets a site recognise the same browser a second time, which is how a preference survives a page change and how a measurement tool counts one reader once rather than nineteen times. By itself the string says nothing about who you are. Combined with records held by companies whose entire business is combining records, it can say a great deal, and that is the reason this page exists.

Two close relatives are treated the same way throughout. Local storage is a browser feature that holds rather more than a cookie and never leaves your machine unless a script sends it somewhere. Pixels are tiny images or scripts whose only function is to register that a page or an advertisement loaded. Everything written below about cookies applies to both.

The cookies THUNDER TIGER sets itself

A handful of cookies belong to this site, meaning they sit under the thundertiger-europe.com domain and only we can read them.

  • A consent cookie that records the choices you made in the privacy banner, so you are not asked again on every article.
  • A preference cookie that remembers settings such as the section you open most often.
  • A session cookie that keeps the site coherent while you move between pages.
  • A measurement cookie that lets our analytics tool tell a returning browser from a new one. It carries a random identifier, never your name, and the tool is configured not to assemble a profile.
  • A security cookie used to separate human readers from automated traffic when the site is under strain or under attack.

None of these is used to choose advertising for you. None of them is passed to anybody else.

The cookies other companies set

Display advertising here is delivered by a third party advertising network. When a banner loads, the network that filled it may write a cookie under its own domain, and it may read that same cookie on other sites it serves. That is the mechanism behind interest based advertising, and it is the only cross site tracking that happens on this site.

Embedded material can also set cookies. A highlights clip, a trailer, a chart, a route map or a social media post that is itself the subject of the story loads from whichever service hosts it, and that service may write cookies while it loads. We embed things only where the embedded thing is part of the reporting. What those companies then do with their own cookies is governed by their own policies, not ours. What we do control is whether the code runs at all, and where consent is required by the law that applies to you, it does not run until you have given it.

The four categories in the banner

Where a consent banner is shown, it sorts everything into four groups, and the labels are worth translating.

  • Strictly necessary. The site does not function without them. Session and security cookies live here. The banner cannot switch them off, though your browser can, at the cost of parts of the site working properly.
  • Preferences. They remember what you chose. Switch them off and the site forgets your choices between visits, including your cookie choices.
  • Analytics. They let us count readers and see which stories were read. Switching them off breaks nothing; it makes our numbers less accurate.
  • Advertising. They let the network pick banners based on browsing elsewhere and confirm that a banner was seen. Switching them off does not clear the page of advertising. It makes the advertising generic.

Consent depends on where you are

The rules are not the same everywhere. In several regions non-essential cookies may not be set at all until you have agreed, and the banner shown to readers there is built so that refusing takes exactly as few clicks as accepting. In a number of United States jurisdictions the right on offer is an opt out of cookies used for cross site advertising, and the same controls deliver it. Everywhere else we apply the stricter approach by default rather than guessing what a local rule would tolerate. Your choice can be changed at any moment from the link in the footer, and changing it takes effect immediately.

Refusing, deleting and signalling

If you were shown a banner, its settings govern every non-essential cookie on this site, and you can reopen it from the footer whenever you like. Separately, every major browser lets you inspect, delete and block cookies, either across the board or site by site, and lets you clear local storage. The exact menu moves between browser versions, so we do not try to reproduce the steps here; the browser’s own help pages are current and ours would not be.

We honour the Global Privacy Control signal, which recent browsers and extensions can send on your behalf automatically. When it arrives we read it as a refusal of advertising and analytics cookies, without you needing to open the banner at all. The older Do Not Track header is treated the same way wherever our tools can act on it.

Blocking everything will make parts of the site behave oddly. Consent choices will not persist, so the banner will keep reappearing. Some embedded material will not load. Reading articles will carry on working, because reading is the point of the site.

How long they last

Session cookies vanish when you close the browser. Our consent, preference and measurement cookies last months, so that a reader who returns for the next tournament, the next earnings round or the next console generation is not treated as a stranger. Advertising cookies set by the network have lifetimes the network chooses, commonly from a few days to a little over a year. Any of them can be deleted at any time from your browser, and deleting them resets the site’s memory of you to nothing.

Changes and questions

If we add a category, change a provider or start using cookies for a purpose that is not described on this page, we update the page first and reset the consent banner so that you are asked again rather than carried over on a decision you made about something else. This page sits alongside our privacy policy, which covers everything we hold that is not a cookie, and our terms of service. Questions about cookies go to support@thundertiger-europe.com with PRIVACY in the subject line, and the routes into the newsroom are listed on our contact page.