COOKIE POLICY

1. What This Policy Covers

1.1 This Cookie Policy explains how The Startup Desk (“we,” “our,” “us”) uses cookies and similar tracking technologies on our website, and the choices available to you regarding their use.

1.2 This policy should be read alongside our Privacy Policy, which explains more broadly how we collect and use personal information.

2. What Are Cookies

2.1 Cookies are small text files placed on your device when you visit a website. They allow the site, or a trusted third party, to recognise your device and remember certain information about your visit such as your interface preferences or how you navigated the site.

3. Cookies We Use

3.1 We use only one category of cookies on this website: analytics cookies, delivered via Google Analytics.

3.2 These cookies help us understand how visitors use our website; for example, which pages are visited most, how long visitors stay, and how they arrive at our site. This information is aggregated and does not, by itself, identify you personally.

3.3 We strictly do not use:

• Behavioral advertising or retargeting cookies
• Third-party outbound marketing trackers
• Social media tracking pixels

4. Other Infrastructure Processing

4.1 Infrastructure: Our website is hosted via Cloudflare, which may process technical request data (such as IP addresses) as part of standard web security and content delivery, this is infrastructure-level processing, not a cookie database, and does not track you across other external sites for marketing purposes.

4.2 AI Assistant: If you interact with our AI chat assistant (powered by AssistLoop), it may use session-based technical identifiers to maintain your active conversation sequence. This data is used solely to operate the live chat engine window.

5. Your Choices

5.1 Controls: You can control or disable cookies at any time through your browser settings. Most modern browsers allow you to:

• View what cookies are actively stored on your physical device
• Delete cookies individually or purge them entirely
• Block cookies from specific or all websites going forward

5.2 Non-Discrimination: If you disable analytics cookies, our website will continue to function normally; you will not lose access to any content, forms, or consultancy tiers. You will simply no longer be included in our anonymised usage analytics models.

5.3 Advertising Disclaimer: Because we do not use cookies for advertising, marketing, or cross-site profiling tracking, there is no “personalised experience” layout you would lose by disabling them.

6. Consent Framework

6.1 Explicit Choice: Consent on our platform is granted strictly through explicit, affirmative action. When you first visit our website, you will be presented with a cookie consent banner.

• Accepting the banner authorizes Google Analytics to deploy cookies and analyze your anonymized session data.
• Declining or ignoring the banner restricts tracking entirely; our analytics engine will remain in an absolute idle state, and no persistent tracking cookies will be stored on your device.

6.2 Revocation: You may revoke or modify your consent at any time. To do so, simply clear your browser's cache and site cookies, which will remove your stored preference and force the consent choices to reappear upon your next visit.

7. Changes to This Policy

7.1 We may update this Cookie Policy from time to time to reflect changes in the tools we deploy or applicable data laws. Material changes will be reflected by updating the effective date at the top of this document.