Privacy demo

I did not set a cookie.But I know this much about you.

You have got good at refusing them. You find the reject button, you close the banner, you move on feeling like you kept something back. The banner was never the point.

Reading your browser…

Before any script ran

These arrived with the request itself. Blocking JavaScript does not stop them, because without them the reply cannot reach you.

IP address: 18.97.9.169the one thing I genuinely cannot avoid receiving, because the reply has to reach you
Roughly where: Ashburn, VA, USmy host resolves this from the IP before my code runs
Browser string: CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)
Languages: en-US,en;q=0.5
Came from: not sentblank when you type the address in yourself

Where you are

Your clock and your locale, which you never chose to hand over.

Harmless so far. A clock and a language, the sort of thing any site needs to show you a date correctly.

What you are using

The machine itself, described by the browser running on it.

What you are looking at

Screen geometry is one of the most identifying things about you, because so few people share an exact combination.

This is where it starts to bite. Screen geometry, pixel ratio and refresh rate together are rarer than you would guess, and you cannot turn any of them off.

What you are browsing with

Version strings, and the privacy settings you may have turned on.

What draws your pixels

WebGL will name your actual graphics chip to any page that asks.

That is your actual chip, named by your actual driver. No permission prompt exists for it.

How you like things

Accessibility and display preferences are readable by every stylesheet on the web.

Those are accessibility settings. You chose them for your own comfort, not to be read by a stranger, and every stylesheet on the web can see them.

How you got here

A rough shape of your connection, offered up so sites can adapt.

The parts you cannot turn off

These are not settings. They are artefacts of how your specific hardware and software draw, compute, and sound.

All of it, as one number

………

Reload this page. Close the tab and come back tomorrow. It stays the same, because your machine recomputes it every time. That is why nobody needs to store anything on it.

I am not going to tell you how rare that makes you. Doing it honestly needs population data I do not have.

Now the part that clears me

Every cookie and storage key this page can read. A site only ever sees its own, never another site’s, so this is the full extent of what I could keep about you even if I wanted to.

Tell someone

The people who most need to know this are the ones who think the reject button was doing something.

“This site never asked me for a cookie. It just helped itself to my browser and then showed me the receipt.”

LinkedIn and Facebook only carry the link, they stopped accepting prefilled text years ago, and Instagram has no web share at all. Use Copy for those.

So what do I do with it

Nothing. Everything below the first section was worked out inside your browser and sent nowhere. No request carried it back to me and I wrote nothing to your storage to recognise you later. Open your network tab and watch.

The one thing I keep is a page-view count through Vercel’s analytics, which is cookieless. It tells me this page was read. It does not tell me it was you.

The point is not that this site is clever. It is that the next site you open does all of this too, will not show you the list, and will hang it on a profile that follows you around. That is the part the banner never covered.

If you want less of it, a browser that resists fingerprinting is worth far more than refusing cookies. Safari and Firefox both blank several of the values above. Open this page in each and watch the count of answered questions fall.

The part that reads your browser is open source, so you can show your own visitors the same thing: cookieless-fingerprint. Self-hosted only, on purpose. The same code served from someone else’s domain would just be a tracker with better manners.

Built as a demo, on a site that also publishes its own data as a signed, readable API.