Cookie Policy | Opus Business Expert

1. What cookies are

Cookies are small text files a website asks your browser to store on your device. They let a site remember something between one page and the next, or between one visit and the next.

This policy explains what this website stores, what it does not, and what the service in front of it may store. It should be read alongside our privacy policy.

2. The cookies this site sets itself, and one Google may

Name: NEXT_LOCALE
Purpose: Remembers which language you are reading the site in, so that a later visit or a link to the site’s root takes you back to the same one.
Value: Either “en” (English) or “zh” (Chinese).
Lifetime: A session cookie. No expiry is set, so your browser discards it when you close it.
Scope: SameSite=Lax. First-party. It is never sent to anyone else.
Category: Strictly necessary for a feature you have asked for — being served the site in your chosen language.

It is not even set on every visit. It is written only when your browser’s own language preference disagrees with the language we serve you, or when you pick a language explicitly using the language selector. If neither happens, no cookie is set at all.

The cookie holds a two-letter language code and nothing else. It contains no identifier, nothing about you, and nothing that could be used to recognise you on another site.

Name: obe_consent
Purpose: Records whether you accepted or declined analytics cookies and advertising cookies, each separately, so that you are asked once rather than on every page.
Value: A short code recording which categories you accepted — for example “v3:a1x0”, meaning analytics yes, advertising no. It holds your choices and nothing else: no identifier, and nothing that describes you.
Lifetime: Six months, after which you are asked again. Deleting it resets the choice.
Scope: SameSite=Lax. First-party. It is never sent to anyone else.
Category: Strictly necessary. A cookie whose only job is to remember that you declined cannot itself require consent — the alternative would be asking you again on every page.

It is set only once you answer the banner. If you never answer it, no consent cookie is written and no analytics or advertising cookie is set — though Google Tag Manager itself still loads, as section 3 explains.

If you accept advertising, Google Tag Manager may in future set a further cookie from Google, to link an advertisement you clicked to something you later do on this site. None of this is set today — there is no Google Ads account connected to this site yet — so the row below describes what accepting advertising would let Google set, not a cookie currently in use.

Name: _gcl_aw
Purpose: Google Tag Manager’s Conversion Linker tag. Google’s own documentation for it: the tag “automatically detects the ad click information in your landing page URLs, and stores this information in first-party cookies”, so that if you go on to take an action we are measuring, Google Ads can associate that conversion with the click that brought you here — even though the click and the later action happen on different domains. Set by Google, through the tag manager, not by our own code. Google’s documentation names a sibling cookie for the same purpose, _gcl_gs, which this row covers as well.
Value: An identifier generated by Google. We do not read it.
Lifetime: 90 days, as published in Google’s own cookie documentation.
Scope: First-party to this domain, but set and read by Google, not by us.
Category: Advertising. Set only if you accept the advertising category, and only once an advertising campaign exists for it to support.

3. What this site does not do

No analytics storage at all unless you accept it, and none by default.
No advertising cookies unless you accept them, separately from analytics.
No social media tracking widgets or share buttons that phone home.
No fingerprinting by us.
If you accept advertising, Google may recognise your device on other sites in order to measure and show our adverts; refusing advertising prevents that.
Nothing written to your browser’s local or session storage by us.
No A/B testing, session recording or heat mapping.

Loading a page of this site requests Google Tag Manager from googletagmanager.com. The container runs no tags today, so nothing beyond that request happens: no cookie is set, nothing is read, and Google receives no more than any web request carries, including your IP address. Once analytics or advertising tags are configured there, this changes — with every category of storage switched off until you choose, and even if you decline, Google would then receive a cookieless ping for each page you load: the page’s URL and title, your screen and viewport size, your browser’s language, and a randomly generated identifier scoped to that page load and discarded afterwards, used to model conversions statistically. Every font, image, style and script the page itself needs is served from this domain.

4. Analytics, advertising, and your choices about them

Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, consent is required before storing information on your device unless doing so is strictly necessary to provide a service you have requested. Two of the three cookies described above fall within that exemption: one serves you the language you asked for, the other remembers your answer to the question below. The third — Google’s conversion-linking cookie — does not: it is set only if you accept advertising, which is what that question is asking.

Analytics and advertising do not fall within it, so we ask. On your first visit a banner offers you Accept and Reject with equal prominence, and a Preferences control to accept one and refuse the other. Until you choose, and if you choose Reject, no analytics or advertising cookie is set on your device — and, since the tag manager container runs no tags today, nothing else reaches Google either. Section 3 explains what would change, regardless of your choice, once tags exist.

Google Tag Manager already runs on every page, as section 3 explains. If you accept, it may then set cookies from Google. Analytics cookies measure how the site is used — how many people visit a page and which routes they take. Advertising cookies measure what happens after someone clicks one of our adverts, and may be used to recognise your device on other sites in order to show you our adverts there. Accepting one does not accept the other.

You can change your mind at any time by deleting the obe_consent cookie in your browser, which makes the banner appear again. Section 8 explains how to clear cookies for this site.

5. Cookies set by Cloudflare

This website is served through Cloudflare, which sits in front of it to route and protect traffic. Depending on how that service is configured, Cloudflare may set its own cookies on requests to this domain — typically __cf_bm, a short-lived bot management cookie, and in some configurations __cfruid or cf_clearance, which are used to distinguish genuine visitors from automated traffic.

These are set by Cloudflare rather than by us, are used for security rather than analytics or advertising, and are governed by Cloudflare’s own privacy policy. Cloudflare also processes the IP address of every request to this site as part of routing and protecting it.

6. Embedded content, such as a map

This site embeds a map of our office from Google. What happens with it follows the analytics choice you made about cookies — not the advertising one — and whether you press the button described below.

If you accepted analytics, the map loads with the page, in the same way any other part of it does. Accepting advertising alone does not load it; the map follows the analytics choice specifically. Google may then set its own cookies and will receive your IP address, under Google’s privacy policy rather than ours.

If you declined, or have not answered yet, the map itself still does not load. You see a placeholder with a button, and the map requests nothing further from Google until you press it — pressing it loads the map for that visit only and changes no stored preference. Google Tag Manager runs regardless, as sections 3 and 4 describe; that is a separate request from the map. The address itself is written on the page as ordinary text either way, so you never need the map to find us.

7. Other information we process about your visit

Submitting the enquiry form causes the IP address of the request to be counted, in memory, so that no more than five submissions an hour can come from one address. That count is never written to disk, never included in the email we receive, and is discarded within the hour. It is not a cookie and nothing is stored on your device. Our privacy policy sets out the lawful basis.

8. Managing cookies

Every current browser lets you block or delete cookies, either generally or for a particular site, in its settings or preferences. The Information Commissioner’s Office publishes plain-English guidance on doing so.

Blocking the language cookie will not stop this site working. It will simply stop remembering the language you chose, so you may need to choose again on a later visit.

9. Who we are, and how to contact us

Trading name: Opus Business Expert
Registered company name: To be confirmed
Legal form: Private limited company
Company number: 16173384
Registered office: 17 King Street, Knutsford, WA16 6DW
Type of service: IT consultancy and executive support
Email: [email protected]
Telephone: 01565 364819

We may update this policy from time to time. The current version is always the one published on this page, and its effective date is shown at the top.