How IT Club uses cookies and storage
IT Club uses a small number of cookies and browser storage technologies to operate the website and, where you agree, understand how people use it. Some technologies support the site or remember your choices. Optional analytics technologies are only used after you choose to accept them.
Necessary and preference storage
itclub-cookie-consent
This is first-party browser localStorage, not a cookie. It records whether you selected accepted or rejected for optional analytics and prevents the notice appearing on every page. It has no configured expiry. Storing a visitor’s choice is necessary for the consent mechanism to work, but it does not itself enable analytics.
sidebar_state
This first-party cookie remembers whether the site’s sidebar is open or collapsed. It is set for up to seven days by the user-interface component. Its classification as strictly necessary is still under review because it is a convenience preference rather than analytics. The site does not use it to identify you.
Optional analytics
If you accept optional analytics, IT Club loads Google Analytics 4, provided by Google, to measure visits and engagement and improve the site. The tag is intended to load only after acceptance. Google may use cookies such as _ga and a property-specific analytics cookie after consent; exact names and retention can vary by Google’s current configuration and were not independently fixed by IT Club.
Analytics is not strictly necessary for reading or using ITClub.work. IT Club does not intentionally send Advisor form contents, names, email addresses, business names, telephone numbers or payment details as analytics event data.
Consent and withdrawal
The cookie notice lets you accept all optional analytics or reject non-essential technologies. You can reopen Cookie Settings from the footer and change your choice at any time.
Changing an accepted choice to rejected updates the consent preference, tells the analytics integration that storage is denied, removes the Google tag and clears the known Google Analytics cookies and browser storage created by this site. Analytics event tracking stops until you explicitly accept again. A hosting-layer cookie named GAESA is documented below separately because the application cannot control or remove it.
Hosting infrastructure cookie
A live HTTP response sets a cookie named GAESA before a visitor makes a cookie choice. It is not created by the IT Club application or its Google Analytics tag. The response identifies the setter as the Google Frontend serving the deployment. The cookie is host-only (it is returned for the IT Club site, with path=/), and the observed lifetime is 30 days.
The name, Google Frontend behavior and public Google Cloud session-affinity documentation are consistent with an infrastructure cookie used to route a visitor’s requests to the same application instance. It is not used by IT Club for analytics, advertising or profiling. IT Club cannot configure, read, clear or prevent this hosting-layer cookie from application code; the deployment owner controls whether the relevant serving behavior is enabled.
GAESA is not currently established as strictly necessary. The deployment owner has confirmed that no application-level session-affinity requirement was configured and that they have not enabled session affinity, but the hosting platform’s Autoscale routing behaviour has not been independently confirmed. Its classification therefore remains conditional: it may be strictly necessary only if authoritative hosting evidence shows that the cookie is required for session-affinity routing. Until then, it is kept separate from the optional analytics choice because the application cannot control or remove it; if the hosting behaviour is shown to be unnecessary, its classification and consent treatment must be reassessed. Rejecting optional analytics does not remove GAESA, and this policy does not describe it as an analytics cookie.
Other technologies and third parties
Google Fonts and a Blockmark Tech certification widget may make automatic requests when pages load. The site also uses Resend on the server for email delivery. These services are described in the Privacy Policy. Links to Monzo, WhatsApp and other external sites only transfer you to those sites after you choose to click; their own policies then apply.
This policy covers the current IT Club implementation. If a new non-essential technology or purpose is introduced, the information and consent choice should be reviewed before it is enabled.