Cookie Policy

1. About This Policy

This Cookie Policy explains the small number of cookies Your I Ching uses and why. Cookies are small files a website stores in your browser. We keep our cookie use to the minimum needed to run the Service, remember your theme preference, remember one layout preference inside our internal admin dashboard, and measure Google Ads advertising conversions — every cookie listed below is first-party, including the group written on this domain by our Google Ads conversion measurement tag.

2. Cookies We Set

The Service sets only these service and preference cookies:

• anon_sid — set before you create an account, to track your free-reading allowance and to link readings you cast anonymously to your browser. It is httpOnly (not readable by page scripts), scoped to this site only, and lasts about 180 days. When you log in, the readings tied to it are merged into your account. See our Privacy Policy for more.
• Session cookie — set by our authentication system (Better Auth) after you log in, to keep you signed in.
• yic_theme_mode — a first-party cookie that remembers whether you chose Automatic, Day, or Night appearance. It lasts one year. The same preference is also stored in localStorage as your-i-ching-theme-mode so the site can apply your choice before the page finishes loading.
• sidebar_state — set only inside the internal admin dashboard, to remember whether the admin navigation panel is collapsed or expanded. It is written by client-side JavaScript (not httpOnly), scoped to this site only, and lasts about 7 days. Regular visitors never receive this cookie — it is only ever set for logged-in administrators using the admin panel.
• _gcl_aw, _gcl_gs, _gcl_au, and _gcl_gb — written by our Google Ads conversion measurement tag (see Section 3 below) to attribute a completed purchase back to the Google Ads click that led to it. They are readable by page scripts, scoped to this site only, and last about 90 days. Visitors browsing from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland are not given these cookies.

The anonymous-session and session cookies are essential for the Service to work. Clearing all site data, including cookies and localStorage, will sign you out, reset your anonymous free-reading allowance, and reset the saved theme preference. Clearing only cookies will still sign you out and reset the anonymous-session link, but the localStorage theme preference can remain and continues to take priority until it is cleared separately.

3. Measurement and Advertising Conversion Tracking

The only third-party tracking tag on this site is our Google Ads conversion measurement tag. It loads on every user-facing page — the global 404 page and the global error page use a different layout and do not load it — and, like any request a loaded page makes to Google, it reports the address of the page you are currently viewing. The internal admin dashboard and the email-verification and password-reset pages do not load it.

Ad personalization is turned off for every visitor, and the tag is not used for remarketing. Visitors browsing from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland still load the tag, but it does not write the advertising cookies listed in Section 2 for them, and does not use those cookies to attribute a purchase to a Google Ads click for them.

Beyond that tag, we rely on two cookie-less sources to understand how the Service is used:

• Platform traffic measurement — our hosting platform, Vercel, provides privacy-friendly, cookie-less traffic and performance measurement (Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights). It reports aggregated page views, referrers, device type, and page-performance metrics. It does not set a cookie, does not build a cross-site profile of you, and is not used for advertising.
• First-party product usage events — the application itself records a small number of product events (for example, a reading being cast or a checkout being started) to our own database, tagged only with the event name, a timestamp, and the account or anonymous session it belongs to. These events never include your question text.

Except for the Google Ads conversion tag described above, we do not embed any other third-party advertising or remarketing pixels, and we do not sell your personal data. If this ever changes, we will update this policy before doing so.

4. Changes and Contact

We may update this Cookie Policy from time to time; the effective date above reflects the latest version. For questions about our use of cookies, contact the site operator.