The short version
Two cookies, and both of them count visits
River Flood Watch uses Google Analytics, and it is the only thing on this site that sets a cookie. It sets two. They exist so that we can see which parts of the site people actually use: which screens get opened, which are ignored, whether the guide gets read, whether a change made things better or worse. They are there so that we can build a better site. That is the whole of it.
There is no advertising on this site and nothing on it is for sale, so there is nothing here for a profile of you to be worth anything to. We have not linked the site to Google Ads and have not turned on Google’s advertising features, which are the settings that would let analytics data be used to target advertising at you elsewhere.
You can switch it off, in about a minute and without asking us: how to do it is below, and the site works exactly the same afterwards. Nothing about the river, your gauges or your alerts depends on analytics being on.
Separately from the cookies, the site keeps your chosen gauges on your device in browser storage. That is not a cookie, it is never sent to us, and it is not part of analytics. What it is is set out below too.
- Two cookies, one purpose
- Both are Google Analytics, and both are there to count visits and see which parts of the site get used. Nothing else on the site sets a cookie.
- No advertising, no selling
- No ad network, no Google Ads link, no advertising features, and nothing sold or handed to anybody for marketing. There is no money in this site to make.
- Your gauges stay on your device
- The gauges you pick live in your own browser’s storage, are never sent to us, and are no part of what analytics sees. Clear your browsing data and they are gone.
- Off in a minute, and no worse a site
- Block the cookies, install Google’s own opt-out, or read in a private window. Every screen, every height and every alert works the same either way.
The cookies
What Google Analytics sets, and what it sees
Google Analytics is a measurement service run by Google. The site loads Google’s script, which sets two cookies on your device, both first-party, meaning they are set on this site’s own address rather than on a domain that follows you across the web:
| Cookie | Lasts | What it holds, and what it is for |
|---|---|---|
| _ga | 2 years | A random number for this browser and nothing else: no name, no address, nothing taken from you. It is what lets a second visit next week be counted as a returning reader rather than as a new one. |
| _ga_… | 2 years | The same idea one level down: it holds the state of your visit, when it started and how many pages in you are, so that six screens read in one sitting count as one visit rather than six. The rest of its name is the site’s measurement ID. |
What is sent to Google
When you open a page, Google’s script sends it the address of the page, the page you arrived from if there was one, and the ordinary things a browser announces to every site it visits: your browser and version, your operating system, your language, your screen size, and your IP address. From the IP address Google works out an approximate location (country, state, usually the city) and, in Google Analytics 4, does not store the address itself. What we then see, in the dashboard, is counts: how many people opened the map yesterday, which catchments get read, how many got as far as turning alerts on.
Your gauges are not in it. Which stations you follow, which levels you set alerts at, and which river you last looked at live in your browser’s own storage and are never sent to Google or to us. Neither is anything that identifies you personally: there is no account, no email address and no name anywhere on this site for analytics to attach to a visit.
Google is a processor of this data on our behalf and holds it under its own terms for sites that use its services, which include transferring and storing it outside Australia. We keep the reader-level data for 14 months, after which Google deletes it; the aggregate counts outlive it, because a count of last winter’s visits says nothing about anybody.
Switching it off
Three ways to not be counted
None of them needs our permission and none of them breaks the site. Every height, every gauge, the map, the printable report and the alerts work identically with analytics blocked; it is a counter bolted to the side, not part of how the river is drawn.
- Google’s own opt-out. The Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on stops Google Analytics on every site you visit, not just this one. It is made by Google and is the most complete of the three.
- Block cookies for this site, in your browser’s site settings. Most browsers also have tracking protection that blocks analytics scripts outright: Firefox and Safari do it by default, and if you use either you may already be invisible to it.
- Read in a private or incognito window. The cookies are set and thrown away when you close it, so every visit is counted as a stranger. This clears your gauges too, which is the trade.
This is a Queensland site for Queensland readers, and Australian privacy law does not require one for measurement of this kind. We also think a pop-up between somebody and a river height at two in the morning is a worse thing to do to a reader than counting their visit. If that judgement ever changes, or if the site starts being read from places whose law does require a banner, this page will say so before anything else does.
What else is on your device
Browser storage, which is not a cookie
The two cookies above are the only cookies. But the site does keep other things on your device, your gauges chiefly, and it would be a thin sort of honesty to write a page about cookies and not say so.
The difference between the two is real and not a technicality. A cookie is attached to every request your browser makes, so a server sees it whether it asked for it or not. Browser storage is never sent anywhere. It sits on your device, is readable only by pages on this site, and reaches us only if our own code deliberately puts it in a request, which, for your gauges and the river you last looked at, it never does. The third row is the one exception, and only as far as its own entry says. None of it is visible to Google Analytics.
| Name | Kind | What it is, and how long it lasts |
|---|---|---|
| river-watch.gauges.v1 | Local storage | The gauges you chose, as a list of Bureau station numbers. This is your river list. It is written when you press Save in the picker and kept until you change it or clear your browsing data. Never sent to us. |
| river-watch.catchment.v1 | Local storage | The catchment you last looked at, so the site opens on your river rather than on the Brisbane every time. One name. Kept until you look at a different one or clear your browsing data. Never sent to us. |
| river-watch.alerts.v1 | Local storage | This browser’s copy of your alert settings: which gauges you asked to be told about, and at which level. Written only if you turn alerts on. The real list lives on our side too, because an alert has to fire with the site closed; see Alerts below. |
.v1 is on the end so that if the shape of what we store ever has to change, the new version is a new name and your old list is simply ignored rather than half-read into something that looks like a river you did not choose.
The service worker, if you turn alerts on
Turning on alerts installs a small background script at /sw.js, because a browser will not deliver a notification to a site that is closed without one. It is worth being precise about what it is not: it is not an offline cache and stores no pages, no heights and no history. It wakes when a notification arrives for you, shows it, and goes back to sleep. It is removed when you turn alerts off, and by clearing site data.
Getting rid of it
Clearing it, and what that costs you
Everything on this page, the two analytics cookies and all three rows of browser storage, is cleared by the same control in your browser: “Clear browsing data”, “Cookies and site data”, or whatever yours calls it. You do not need to ask us. Clearing the cookies does not delete the counts Google already holds, though; for that, use the opt-out, which stops them being made in the first place.
Because your gauges live only in the browser, clearing site data for this site deletes them, and there is no export, no backup and no account to restore from. Rebuilding takes a minute if you have the Bureau station numbers; the guide suggests keeping them in your notes for exactly this reason.
Two related things surprise people, and neither is a fault:
- It is per browser, not per device. One laptop running Chrome and Firefox keeps two separate lists, and a private or incognito window forgets everything the moment you close it.
- A browser that blocks storage still works. Some privacy settings refuse it outright. You can still choose gauges and read the river for that visit; the site simply will not remember next time.
Other companies
What reaches anybody but us
On an ordinary visit, opening the site, reading the rail, opening a gauge, printing a report, your browser talks to this site and to Google, for the analytics described above, and to nobody else. There are no fonts fetched from elsewhere, no scripts from a content network, no social buttons and no embedded anything. Even the small map picture on the river screen is fetched through us rather than from the mapmaker, so that reading a height involves no third party beyond the counter.
The analytics script itself is loaded from Google, so opening any page on this site means your browser fetches a file from them and sends them the visit. That is what the section above describes, and the opt-outs are how you stop it. Their handling of what they receive is theirs and is governed by Google’s privacy policy.
The full map
The second third party, and it is behind a deliberate press. The full pan-and-zoom map is drawn by Mapbox, and opening it means your browser fetches map tiles from them directly: they receive your IP address and their own software may set storage or cookies of its own in the process. Those are theirs, not ours: we neither read nor control them, and they are governed by Mapbox’s privacy policy. If you would rather not, do not open the full map: everything else on the site works without it.
Hosting
The site runs on Cloudflare, which serves every page and stands between the site and the internet. Like any web server, it sees the request your browser makes, including your IP address, and its own protective machinery may set a cookie of its own to tell a browser from a bot. That is a hosting mechanism rather than one of ours: we do not read it, nothing on this site depends on it, and it carries nothing about which gauges you watch.
We use your IP address for one thing, briefly and in memory: when a device saves alert settings, the request is counted against a short per-address limit so that a script in a loop cannot flood the endpoint. It is a counter that expires in seconds, not a record of who visited.
Alerts
The one thing we store about a device
Alerts are optional, off until you turn them on, and they are the only part of the site where anything of yours is kept on our side; analytics is kept on Google’s, and the two have nothing to do with each other. Alerts still need no account and no email address. When you turn them on, your browser generates a push subscription and we store it, because a notification has to be deliverable when the site is closed. It is three things:
- A URL at your browser vendor’s push service (Google, Mozilla, Apple or Microsoft, depending on your browser), which is the address a notification is posted to. It names a browser installation, not a person.
- Two keys your browser made, which encrypt the notification so that only your device can read its contents in transit.
- Which gauges you follow, and at what level to alert you.
There is no name, no email address and no account attached to any of it, and it is used for one purpose only: sending you the alerts you asked for. Turning alerts off in the site deletes the subscription from our side; so does revoking notification permission in your browser, since the push service then rejects our next attempt and the record is pruned.
A notification can be late, silent or never arrive: phones sleep, networks drop and push services queue. Never rely on one as your only warning. In an emergency call 000; for storm and flood assistance call the SES on 132 500.
Changes
If this ever stops being true
The undertaking is narrow enough to be worth making: analytics on this site is for seeing what gets used and making it better, and if that ever changes, if a cookie is added that does something else, if advertising features are turned on, if anything here is ever linked to an ad network, then this page changes on the same day, and says what changed. It is dated below for exactly that reason.
Two things that will not change without being asked for first: there will be no advertising on a flood site, and nothing about which gauges you watch will be sold or handed to anybody. Those live on your device and are not ours to give.
The site’s source code is open, so most of this page is checkable rather than merely promised: the storage names in the table above are the ones in the code, and the analytics tag is the only third-party script in it.
About us is the short version of this page, and the full disclaimer is the one that says how much to trust a height. If any of the three disagree, the disclaimer is right about the numbers and the code is right about the storage.