Cookie Policy

Cookies are small text files that websites store on your device. They serve many purposes — some essential, some analytical, some commercial. We use as few as we reasonably can. The Site works without enabling any non-essential cookies.

Categories of cookies on this Site

Essential cookies

Required for the Site to function. These cookies do not track you across the web; they exist to support basic operation — for example, remembering whether you have dismissed a notification, or preserving your input on a contact form across page reloads.

Set by: Vercel (the platform that hosts the Site). You cannot opt out of essential cookies; if you disable them, parts of the Site may not function.

Analytics cookies

Help us understand how readers use the Site so we can improve it. We use Vercel Analytics (privacy-focused, no cross-site tracking) and may use Google Analytics 4 in some configurations (configurable with IP anonymization).

What they record: page views, time on page, geographic region (anonymized), referring source, device type. They do not identify you personally.

How to opt out: see “How to manage cookies” below. You can also install browser-level analytics blockers (uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger), which we do not object to.

Affiliate-tracking cookies

Set by the merchant’s affiliate network when you click an affiliate link from this Site to a merchant’s site. These cookies tell the merchant that you arrived from us, so that any purchase you complete within the cookie window (typically 24 hours to 90 days) is attributed to The 40 Method and we receive the commission.

What they record: the click-through event, typically with a unique identifier for the affiliate program. They do not give us personal data; the merchant does the tracking, not us.

How to opt out: do not click affiliate links, or disable third-party cookies in your browser, or use browser extensions that block affiliate tracking. Disabling affiliate tracking does not change the price you pay; it only changes whether we earn a commission on your purchase.

Marketing cookies

We do not use marketing cookies. We do not run display advertising. We do not retarget you across the web. We do not build advertising profiles based on your behavior on the Site.

How to manage cookies

You can control cookies in several ways:

• Browser settings.Every major browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) allows you to view, manage, and delete cookies. Look for “Privacy” or “Cookies and site data” in your browser’s settings menu.
• Browser extensions. Tools like uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, or Ghostery can block analytics and tracking cookies system-wide.
• “Do Not Track” signal.Most browsers support a Do Not Track signal. We honor it for analytics. (The broader web’s response to Do Not Track is inconsistent; ours is to respect it.)
• Private / Incognito mode. Most browsers offer a private-browsing mode that discards cookies at session end.

What happens if you disable all non-essential cookies

The Site continues to work. Articles read normally. Search works. Internal links work. The two effects are: (1) we lose visibility into how readers use the Site (we’ll measure usage at the aggregate Vercel-server level instead), and (2) if you click an affiliate link, the merchant may not attribute the conversion to us — meaning we don’t earn a commission, but the price you pay is identical.

Changes to this policy

When we add new analytics tools or third parties that set cookies, we update this policy and note the change at the top. The newsletter is delivered by Substack on a separate domain; Substack sets its own cookies on substack.com once you subscribe there.

Contact

Questions about cookies, tracking, or how to opt out: disclosure@the40method.com.

Related

See our Privacy Policy for the broader picture of what data we collect and how we use it. See our FTC Affiliate Disclosure for how affiliate cookies fit into the commercial side of the Site.