Cookie Policy — United States

The short version

KnowCarCost has no accounts and no login. Every calculator runs inside your own browser and the figures you type are never sent to us or anyone else. There is exactly one optional cookie — Google Analytics — and it is switched off unless you press "Accept analytics". Nothing about a calculator result is ever tracked.

What cookies and browser storage are

A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to store, and which the browser sends back with later requests to that site. Browser storage (localStorage) is a similar idea, except the values stay on your device and are never transmitted with requests. Both can be cleared at any time from your browser settings.

Cookies set by KnowCarCost

Essential cookies: none of our own. The calculator, the market switcher and every page work without any cookie being set by us.

Cloudflare is our hosting and security provider (it sits in front of the site). It may set a short-lived bot-management cookie, __cf_bm, when its security checks require it. That cookie is strictly necessary to keep the site available and to block abusive automated traffic, it lasts about 30 minutes, and it contains no personal data. An ordinary page request does not set it.

Analytics cookies — only after you accept: Google Analytics 4 sets _ga and _ga_98PVVWY07Y, both lasting two years, which tell us how many people visited, which country they came from, which pages were read and which pages threw errors. We use this only to work out which markets find the tools useful and what is broken. Google Analytics 4 does not store your IP address. If you press "Reject", the analytics script is never loaded into the page at all.

Advertising cookies — only after you accept: we show ads through Google AdSense. When you accept, Google and its advertising partners may set cookies and read device identifiers to measure ad performance and, where you have allowed it, to personalise the ads you see. These include the __gads and __gpi cookies set by Google, the DoubleClick IDE cookie and any cookies set by the advertisers bidding in that auction; they typically last from a few days up to around 13 months. Google publishes the full list of the cookies it uses for advertising at policies.google.com/technologies/cookies. You can turn personalised advertising off at adssettings.google.com and opt out of many participating vendors at aboutads.info. If you press "Reject", every advertising signal stays denied, so no ad cookie is written and only limited, non-personalized ads can appear. Our Privacy Policy explains what Google receives and why.

Storage kept in your browser (not sent anywhere)

kcc-consent-v1 records the cookie choice you made, so the bar does not ask you again on every page. drivecost.market records the country you picked, so the site can show the right currency and units next time. Both live only in your browser and are never transmitted to a server. Clearing your browser storage deletes them both and the consent bar will ask again.

How to accept, reject or change your choice

When you first arrive, a bar at the bottom of the page offers "Accept all" or "Reject". Rejecting is a real rejection: the Google Analytics script is never requested and every advertising signal is sent to Google as denied, so no ad or analytics cookie is written and only non-personalized ads can appear. You can change your mind at any time using the "Cookie settings" link in the footer of every page, or by clearing this site's data in your browser. Turning analytics off stops all future measurement, though it cannot un-send data collected while it was switched on.

Third parties on our pages

Apart from Google Analytics (only after you accept) and Google AdSense (which serves the advertising on this site), we do not embed third-party widgets, social plugins or tracking pixels, and no page loads content from another domain. Advertising is delivered by Google in iframes that we do not control; the cookies and identifiers those frames may set are described above and in our Privacy Policy. Links out to other websites are ordinary links: those sites have their own cookie policies, which we do not control.

Questions

This policy sits alongside our Privacy Policy, which explains what we do with personal data, and our Terms of Use. Questions, or a request about your data, can be raised through the details on our Contact page. For general information about cookies and the rules that apply in the UK and Ireland, see the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.