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

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, so that you are asked once rather than on every page.
Value: Either “granted” or “denied”. Nothing else.
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 load.

3. What this site does not do

No analytics at all unless you accept it, and none by default.
No advertising, remarketing or conversion pixels.
No social media tracking widgets or share buttons that phone home.
No cross-site tracking, fingerprinting, or profiling.
Nothing written to your browser’s local or session storage.
No A/B testing, session recording or heat mapping.

Until you accept analytics, loading a page of this site makes no request to any third party: every font, image, style and script it needs is served from this domain. If you accept, the site additionally loads Google Tag Manager from googletagmanager.com. If you decline, or simply do not answer, it never does.

4. Analytics, and your choice about it

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. The two cookies described above fall within that exemption: one serves you the language you asked for, the other remembers your answer to the question below.

Analytics does not fall within it, so we ask. On your first visit a banner offers you Accept and Reject with equal prominence. Until you choose, and if you choose Reject, this site requests nothing from Google and no analytics cookie is set — the tag manager is not loaded and held back, it is not fetched at all.

If you accept, the site loads Google Tag Manager, which in turn may set cookies from Google used to measure how the site is used — for example how many people visit a page and which routes they take through the site. These are analytics cookies, not advertising ones.

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 choice you made about cookies, and nothing else.

If you accepted, the map loads with the page, in the same way any other part of it does. 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 does not load. You see a placeholder with a button, and nothing is requested from Google unless you press it — pressing it loads the map for that visit only and changes no stored preference. 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.