Cookies and tracking

Everything this site stores on your device

Three items, all of them ours — nothing here is set by another company. Reading pages sets none of them: each is written only when you sign in, start filling in a booking request, or ask us not to measure you.

All three are strictly necessary in the ordinary sense of the phrase: one keeps you signed in, one holds work you are in the middle of, and one records a preference you asked us to remember. None of them is used for advertising, and none of them can be read by another site.

How the site is measured without cookies

We do measure traffic. We just do it without putting anything on your device.

• Our own measurement writes no cookie and no browser storage. A visitor is identified by a one-way hash of a secret, the date, the IP address of the request and the browser’s user agent, worked out on our server. The IP address is hashed and discarded, never stored. Because the date is in the hash, the identifier is different tomorrow, which is what stops it following you.
• The session a page view belongs to is worked out on the server too, by grouping that visitor’s events within thirty minutes of each other. An earlier version of this site kept that in browser storage; it was taken out deliberately, because storing it would have been storage on your device for a purpose that is not strictly necessary.
• Our hosting provider’s page-view and page-speed measurement runs on every page. Both scripts load from this domain rather than a third-party one, and neither reads or writes cookies, local storage or session storage.

What is recorded in that measurement, field by field, is listed in the privacy page.

Why there is no banner

A cookie banner exists to ask permission to store things on your device that are not needed to give you what you asked for. This site has nothing in that category. The sign-in cookie is what keeps you signed in. The two local-storage items are written by an action you took on the page in front of you, and one of them is a request not to be measured. The measurement itself puts nothing on your device at all.

So a banner here would ask you to agree to something that is not happening. We would rather write the list down and let you check it. If we ever add tracking that needs permission, we will ask before it runs, and this page will say what changed.

For completeness, here is what this site does not have: no Google Analytics or Tag Manager, no Meta or advertising pixels, no retargeting, no session recording, no heatmaps, no chat widget, no social sharing widgets, no fingerprinting scripts, no external fonts, and no maps or images loaded from another company. The only script on any page other than our own is our hosting provider’s measurement, described above.

Turning things off

• To stop our own measurement, load any page with ?br_optout=1 on the end of the address — for example boatrental.com/?br_optout=1. Reverse it with ?br_optout=0. The setting lives in that browser only, and clearing your browser storage clears it too.
• That switch does not cover our hosting provider’s page-view and page-speed measurement, which is aggregate and stores nothing on your device.
• Your browser can block or clear cookies and site data for boatrental.com. Clearing the sign-in cookie signs you out; clearing site data also removes any saved booking draft.
• We do not currently act on the Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signals some browsers send. Saying so is more use to you than a claim we do not implement.

If you are in the EEA or the UK you can also object to our measurement outright, by writing to us. The privacy page sets out that and the rest of your rights.