Privacy Policy

This policy explains what personal information CookingZone handles when you visit cookingzone.org, why we handle it, who else receives it, and what you can require us to do about it. It applies to this website and to the email addresses we publish. It does not apply to third-party websites you reach by following a link from here.

Questions about anything below go to [email protected]. Last updated September 2026.

Information We Handle

Information You Provide

Correspondence. When you email us, we receive your address, your message and anything you attach. We keep that thread so we can answer it and check back later if the same question returns.
Comments. If you comment on an article, the publishing platform records the name and email address you enter, the comment text, the time, your IP address and your browser identification string. The name and comment are public. The email address and IP address are not.

Information Collected Automatically

One thing happens automatically when you open a page: the web server writes a line in its access log, exactly as any web server does in order to serve a request. That line holds:

The IP address the request came from, which indicates a country or region and nothing finer.
The date and time of the request.
The address of the page requested.
The referring page, when your browser sends one.
The response code the server returned.
The user agent string, which identifies the browser and the operating system.

That list is the whole of it, because it is simply the access log an ordinary web server writes. There is no measurement script on these pages. Nothing records how far you scroll, how long you keep an article open, where you click, the size of your screen or the order in which you read, and no identifier is created to link one visit of yours to another. We do not use Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager, there are no heat maps, no session replay and no A/B testing, and there is no newsletter or mailing list to be signed up to.

The log is read in aggregate, to see how many times an address was requested and to spot automated traffic. That is the extent of what we know about readership, and it does not build a profile of anyone.

Information From Cookies and Similar Technologies

The site itself stores almost nothing: the technical cookies its caching layer needs to serve a page, and the cookie that holds the consent decision you made. Everything else, meaning third-party cookies, browser local storage, pixels and advertising identifiers, belongs to the advertising partners, runs only after you have consented, and exists to serve and cap advertising. The full breakdown by category and lifetime is in the Cookie Policy.

What We Do Not Collect

We do not take payments, so we hold no card or bank details. We do not ask for identity documents, precise satellite location, biometric data, or information about your health, religion, politics, sex life or trade union membership. Please do not send any of that to us, because we have no lawful reason to keep it.

Why We Are Allowed to Process It

Under the General Data Protection Regulation and the United Kingdom equivalent, each activity needs a legal basis. Ours are as follows.

Consent for the advertising and personalization cookies our partners set. You give it through the consent banner and can withdraw it at any time, with no penalty and no loss of access to articles.
Legitimate interests for keeping the site up and secure, preventing fraudulent and automated traffic, reading the server access log in aggregate to see which addresses were requested, and replying to messages you send us. We balance these against your rights and stop where yours outweigh ours.
Legal obligation where we must retain or disclose information to comply with a valid legal requirement.

Advertising Partners

This site is free to read and is funded entirely by the advertising displayed on it. Advertising space is filled programmatically, which means that when a page loads, technology partners bid in real time for the slots on it. The slots are sold by TheMoneytizer, and consent is collected by InMobi Choice, a consent management platform registered under the IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF v2.3).

Those partners may set or read cookies and identifiers in order to select an advert, limit how many times you see the same one, measure whether it was actually visible, and detect invalid or automated traffic. Where you have consented, they may also use interest categories inferred from browsing behavior to choose which advert to show.

If you decline advertising consent, the adverts do not disappear. They become contextual, chosen from the subject of the page rather than from anything inferred about you. The current list of partners active on this site, with links to their own privacy notices, is available in the consent tool reachable from the footer of every page.

We do not control what those companies do once data reaches them, and each of them acts as an independent controller of the information it collects.

Who Else Receives Information

Hosting, content delivery and security providers that serve the pages and filter malicious traffic.
Email providers that carry correspondence between you and us.
The consent management platform, which records your consent decision and passes it to the advertising partners.
Embedded media providers, where a video or similar element is included in an article and loads from another domain.
Legal recipients, where disclosure is required by a valid legal process or is necessary to establish or defend a legal claim.

We do not exchange personal information for money. However, the use of advertising cookies for cross-context behavioral advertising is treated as a sale or sharing under California law, and we handle it as such in the section on California rights below.

International Transfers

Our providers and advertising partners operate in several countries, including the United States. Where information leaves the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, the transfer relies on an adequacy decision or on Standard Contractual Clauses together with additional safeguards where they are required.

How Long We Keep It

Email correspondence: up to twenty-four months after the exchange ends, then deleted.
Comments: for as long as the comment remains published. Ask us and we will remove it and the data attached to it.
Server access logs: rotated and deleted within a few weeks, the ordinary lifetime of a web server log.
Cookies: for the lifetime stated in the Cookie Policy, which ranges from the end of the session to two years.
Aggregate statistics: retained indefinitely, because they no longer identify anyone.

Your Rights in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom

Access a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
Rectification of anything inaccurate or incomplete.
Erasure, where we have no overriding reason to keep it.
Restriction of processing while a dispute about accuracy or legitimate interests is resolved.
Portability of information you provided to us, in a machine-readable format.
Objection to processing based on legitimate interests, and an unconditional objection to direct marketing and profiling connected to it.
Withdrawal of consent at any time, which does not affect processing that already took place.
Complaint to your national supervisory authority, which you may do without contacting us first.

Write to [email protected] to exercise any of these. We may ask for information that lets us confirm the request is genuinely yours, and we will not use it for anything else. We answer within one month, extendable by two further months for complex requests, in which case we will tell you why before the first month ends.

Your Rights in California

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, residents of California may:

Ask which categories of personal information we collected, where it came from, why we collected it, and which categories of third party received it.
Ask for a copy of the specific pieces of personal information we hold.
Ask us to correct inaccurate personal information.
Ask us to delete personal information, subject to the exceptions the statute allows.
Opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising.
Limit the use of sensitive personal information. We do not collect sensitive personal information for the purposes that would trigger this right.
Receive equal service and pricing. We do not charge more, degrade the site, or withhold articles because you exercised a right.

Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

To opt out, open the consent tool linked in the footer of any page and switch off advertising and personalization. That instruction is stored on the browser and device you used, so it needs repeating on each browser you read us with and after you clear cookies.

We also honor the Global Privacy Control signal. If your browser or extension sends it, we treat it as a valid opt-out request for that browser without any further step from you.

We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under sixteen years of age.

An authorized agent may submit a request on your behalf with written permission, and we may still contact you to confirm it.

Other United States Privacy Laws

Residents of states with comparable statutes, including Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Oregon and Montana, hold similar rights of access, correction, deletion, portability and opt-out of targeted advertising. Use the same address and name the right you want to exercise. If we refuse a request, you may appeal by replying to our decision, and we will respond to the appeal in writing.

Children

CookingZone is written for adults who cook and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under thirteen. If you believe a child has sent us information, write to [email protected] and we will delete it.

Security

The site is served over encrypted connections. Access to the mailboxes and to the publishing platform is limited to the people who need it and protected by strong authentication. No system is perfect, and we do not claim otherwise, but the volume of personal information involved in reading a recipe site is deliberately kept small.

Links to Other Sites

Articles link to source material, producers, equipment manufacturers and reference works. Once you follow such a link you are on someone else’s site, under their privacy notice, and outside the scope of this one.

Changes

When this policy changes materially, we update the date at the top and, where the change affects how we use personal information, we ask for consent again through the consent tool. Older versions are available on request.

Contact

Privacy and data protection: [email protected]. Everything else: [email protected].