Cookie Policy
This page lists the cookies and similar technologies used on Somali Update, what each category is for, and how you turn the optional ones off. It sits alongside our privacy policy, which covers personal data generally. Last updated: August 2026.
The short version, if you came here to do one thing and leave: open the consent manager from the site footer, refuse everything except the strictly necessary category, and the site still works exactly as it did.
What a cookie is, and what else does the same job
A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to keep, so the next request your browser makes can be recognised as coming from the same browser. That is all it is. It is how a site remembers you already dismissed a banner, or that you prefer the larger text.
Cookies are not the only technology involved, and treating them as the whole story would mislead you. Local storage keeps small values in the browser in much the same way. A tracking pixel is a tiny image that reports back when a page or an email is opened. Everything here applies to all of it, whatever the file format.
The categories we allow
Every cookie on this site falls into one of four categories, and the consent manager uses the same four. Only the first is set without asking you.
Advertising is the category that does the most work here, and it gets its own sections further down.
- Strictly necessary. Security, load balancing, protection against abusive traffic, and the record of your own consent choices. That last one is worth noticing: refusing everything still leaves one cookie, because otherwise we could not remember that you refused.
- Preferences. Settings you have chosen, such as text size or a notice you dismissed, so the site does not ask twice.
- Analytics. Aggregate measurement of which pages are read, on what device, from which country, and how readers arrived. We use it to see whether the follow-up to a story got read.
- Advertising. Set by the vendors that fill our display inventory. They count impressions, cap how often you see the same creative, detect click fraud, and, where you have consented, build the profile that makes an ad personalised.
Who sets them
A few come from us: the consent record, your preference settings, and security cookies from our hosting and content delivery provider. Our analytics provider sets the measurement cookies described above, on our instructions and for our reporting only.
The advertising cookies come from other companies. Placements we do not sell directly are filled through the programmatic exchanges that serve our display inventory, and each vendor in that chain may set an identifier of its own. We do not print their names here, and the reason is practical rather than evasive: that list changes, sometimes monthly, and a name written into a policy updated once a year would be wrong before you got to it. The consent manager holds the live list, with every vendor named, its purposes stated and the declared lifetime of what it sets. Our advertising page explains how the inventory is sold.
Personalised and non-personalised advertising
If you consent to the advertising category, vendors may use identifiers to select ads from what they have inferred about you and to limit how often you see the same one. That is personalised advertising, and it pays better, which is a fact about the ad market rather than an argument for it.
If you refuse, we serve non-personalised advertising instead. Those ads are chosen from the page you are reading and a coarse location, not from a profile. You still see ads, they still pay for the reporting, and they still involve enough counting to be billed at all, which is measurement rather than profiling.
Changing your mind
The consent manager opens on your first visit and is available afterwards from the footer of every page. Accept all, reject all, or work through the categories one at a time, and come back and change any of it later. There is no penalty.
Consent applies to the browser and device you gave it on, because that is where the record lives. A phone and a laptop are two separate answers, and clearing your cookies deletes the record of your choice, which is why the banner returns after a clear-out. Readers in California will also find the Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information control there, and we honour a Global Privacy Control signal without you opening anything.
Browser controls, industry opt-outs and lifespans
Your browser has its own settings and they override us. Every major browser will block third-party cookies, delete what is stored, and open a private window that discards everything when you close it. The controls sit under privacy or site settings, and blocking third-party cookies is the single most effective thing a reader can do about advertising tracking on any site, this one included.
There are also industry-wide opt-out tools run by the advertising trade bodies rather than by us. The Digital Advertising Alliance runs YourAdChoices and the Network Advertising Initiative runs an opt-out page covering its member companies. Both are found by searching those names, and both work by setting an opt-out cookie, so they vanish when you clear your cookies. Where a vendor operates a personalisation control of its own, such as the ad settings attached to an account you are signed into, that control applies on our pages too.
As for how long things last: session cookies die when you close the browser, our consent record is kept up to a year so we can stop asking, preference cookies run about a year, and analytics cookies a year or two depending on the provider. Advertising identifiers vary most, from a few days to around two years, each declared in the consent manager. Clear your cookies and none of it survives the click. What happens to data already collected is covered by our privacy policy, along with your right to demand deletion. Questions go to support@somaliupdate.com, the only address we run.
