The house sets no tracking cookies on laerio.com. That is the short version. The long version follows, for the privacy-curious and the technically minded.
The site uses Vercel Analytics, a privacy-first tool that does not use cookies, does not store IP addresses, and does not follow you across other websites. It counts visits in aggregate, and it does that without leaving anything on your machine.
What the site also does not use
- Google Analytics.
- Facebook Pixel.
- Hotjar, FullStory, Mixpanel, or Segment.
- Any cross-domain tracking.
- Advertising networks.
- Session replay or heatmap tools.
What this means for you
- No "We use cookies" banner blocking your view.
- No "Accept all" buttons to ignore.
- Faster page loads.
- Your reading is yours.
For the technically curious
The site does use your browser’s localStorage. Everything below is written on your device, by this site alone, and read back by this site alone:
- laerio-theme · whether you prefer the light or dark version of the site.
- laerio-reading-mode · on essay pages in the journal, whether you have switched to reading mode.
- laerio-attr · how you arrived. The page you first landed on, the site that sent you if any (the domain, never the full address), any campaign tag in the link, and a count of visits. It exists so that when somebody writes to the house we know whether they found us through Instagram or a search, which is the difference between guessing and knowing where our work reaches people.
- laerio-roster-draft and laerio-contact-draft · a copy of what you have typed into a form, kept for seven days so a closed tab or a dropped connection does not cost you the whole letter. It is deleted the moment the form sends.
None of these are cookies, and none of them are attached to your requests. There is no advertising pixel of any kind on this site. You can clear these keys at any time in your browser’s site-settings panel, or by opening the developer tools and removing them by hand. Refusing them breaks nothing: with storage blocked, every page still works and every form still sends.
When you do submit a form, what you typed goes to the desk’s inbox, and the arrival note in laerio-attr goes with it, alongside your own answer to “where did you hear about us”. We would rather ask you than follow you, which is why the form asks the question out loud.
What about Vercel?
The site is hosted on Vercel. Vercel may set short-lived security cookies for bot-protection on certain requests. This is industry-standard infrastructure and unavoidable for any modern hosting platform. It is not used for tracking.
Your control
Because the site sets no first-party tracking cookies, there is nothing to opt out of. You can still block all cookies at the browser level, use private or incognito mode, or use a content blocker. The site will work normally in all three cases.
Questions
Write to the desk at hello@laerio.com.