Legal
Cookie Policy
This is a real working draft, grounded in the current Digital Personal Data Protection Act and IT Rules for digital news publishers, and our confirmed registered business details. It is pending a final legal review before it is official.
Last updated: 21 September 2026
1. What this covers
This page lists the cookies and similar browser storage ZioTimes uses, and why. You can change your choice at any time from the Cookie preferences link in the footer.
2. Essential (always on)
These make the site work and are never used to track you:
- ziotimes_locale (cookie, 1 year): remembers which language edition you read.
- authjs.* (cookies, while you're signed in): keep you signed in and protect the sign-in form. Only set if you sign in.
- payload-token (cookie): signs our editorial staff in to the newsroom tools. Never set for readers.
- ziotimes_consent (cookie, 1 year): your cookie choice, shared between ziotimes.live and epaper.ziotimes.live so you're only asked once.
- ziotimes-theme, ziotimes-consent, ziotimes-recently-viewed (stored in your browser, never sent to us): your light/dark choice, a copy of your cookie choice, and the stories you recently opened.
3. Analytics (only if you accept)
Nothing in this section loads until you accept analytics in the cookie banner:
- Google Analytics (_ga, _ga_*): counts visits and how pages are used.
- PostHog (ph_*): shows us which features readers actually use.
If you reject, or later withdraw consent, these scripts are not loaded at all.
4. Embedded video
Videos play through YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com), which doesn't store information about you unless you play the video.
5. Breaking-news alerts
If you turn on alerts, your browser keeps a push subscription so we can deliver them. Turning alerts off deletes it.