Legal
Cookie Policy
Nothing optional runs until you say yes. This page lists every cookie we set, what it does, and how to change your decision in one click.
- Effective
- 1 January 2026
- Last reviewed
- 1 January 2026
The short version
- Analytics and advertising are off until you explicitly turn them on. Not pre-ticked, not justified under legitimate interest.
- The only cookies we set without asking are the ones that keep you signed in and the one that remembers your cookie answer.
- No advertising or analytics script loads on your answers, results, reports, tools or settings — whatever you consented to.
- Cookie preferences in the footer clears your decision and asks you again.
Denied by default
Most sites load their analytics and advertising scripts the moment you arrive, then show you a banner asking permission for something that already happened. We do it the other way around.
On Between Us, consent starts at denied. Until you make a choice, no analytics script and no advertising script is injected into the page. The banner is not decorative; it is the switch. If you ignore it, nothing optional runs, and you can use the whole free product that way indefinitely.
Declining costs you nothing. There is no reduced version of the site for people who say no, no repeated nagging, and no second banner phrased more desperately.
The bu_consent cookie
Your decision is stored in a single first-party cookie named bu_consent. It holds four things: whether you allowed analytics, whether you allowed advertising, when you decided, and the policy version you decided under.
The current version is 2026-01-01. The version matters. If we make a material change to what the optional categories do — a new analytics provider, a different ad configuration — we increment the version, and your old answer stops counting. You will be asked again rather than having a decision you made about one thing applied silently to another.
The cookie contains no identifier, no profile and nothing about you. It is read on the server to decide whether a script tag is rendered at all, which is why refusing consent means the script genuinely never reaches your browser rather than being loaded and then politely asked not to work.
Every cookie, by category
Strictly necessary
These are set without consent because the site cannot function without them. They are first-party, they are not used for advertising, and they are not shared with anyone.
| Cookie | Set by | Purpose and lifetime |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase auth session cookies | Supabase (first-party, on our domain) | Keep you signed in and refresh your session as you move between pages. Without these you would be signed out on every navigation. They expire when the session expires, or when you sign out. |
| bu_consent | Between Us | Remembers your cookie decision and the version it was made under, so you are not asked on every page. Cleared when you use Cookie preferences. |
Analytics — only after you opt in
| What it is | What it does | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy-conscious, aggregate analytics | Counts page views and referrers so we can see which articles and tools people actually use. Cookieless-style measurement: no persistent identifier is stored on your device for this purpose. | No cross-site tracking, no advertising profile, no individual user journeys, no recording of what you typed, and nothing from a signed-in relationship page. |
If you decline analytics, the script is not loaded and no measurement happens. We lose some information about what to improve. That is an acceptable trade.
Advertising — only after you opt in, public pages only
| Provider | Where | What it sets |
|---|---|---|
| Google AdSense | Public pages only — the homepage, articles, quiz landing pages and similar. Never a signed-in relationship page. | Google's own advertising and frequency-capping cookies, set from its domains once the AdSense script loads. These are controlled by Google rather than by us, and are described in Google's own policies. |
Advertising pays for the free product for people who do not buy anything. We would rather say that plainly than pretend the ads are a service to you. If you prefer not to see them, decline advertising cookies, or buy the Advanced Couples Report, which removes ads from your account permanently.
Anyone with an active subscription or a permanent ad-free entitlement does not see ads at all, and the AdSense script is not loaded for them even if advertising consent is recorded.
Private pages carry no scripts
This holds regardless of what you consented to. No advertising script and no analytics script is loaded on:
- the couples questionnaire, the waiting screen and your comparison results;
- the relationship tools, including conflict descriptions and reflection boxes;
- your reports;
- your private journal;
- your account settings.
The rule is implemented as a list of forbidden surfaces checked before any script tag is rendered, so a mistake in a page component cannot accidentally opt a private page in. If you ever see an advertisement on one of those pages, that is a bug and we would like to hear about it immediately.
Changing or withdrawing consent
Select Cookie preferences in the footer of any page. That clears your recorded decision and brings the banner back, so changing your mind takes exactly as many clicks as making the choice did in the first place. There is no settings maze and no “are you sure” sequence designed to wear you down.
Withdrawing consent stops future loading immediately. Cookies that a third party already set on your device are not ours to delete; use your browser controls below, or the provider's own opt-out, to clear those.
Browser controls
Every major browser lets you block or delete cookies, usually under privacy settings. You can block third-party cookies entirely, clear cookies for a single site, or use a private window that discards them when you close it.
One caution: blocking all cookies for this site will sign you out and keep signing you out, because the authentication session is carried in a cookie. Blocking third-party cookies is safe and will not break anything on Between Us.
We also honour prefers-reduced-motion and other browser-level preferences where they apply, which is a separate matter from cookies but worth knowing — see the accessibility statement.
Questions
If something here does not match what you are seeing in your browser, tell us at privacy@betweenus.app — that would be a discrepancy worth investigating, not a documentation nuisance.
The privacy policy covers everything else we hold, and the terms of service cover the rest of the agreement.
This policy describes the cookie behaviour as built. If we add a provider, this page and the consent version change together — never one without the other.