Cookies

A cookie is a small text record that a website asks your browser to keep and to send back on later visits. Browsers also offer other kinds of storage, such as local storage and session storage, which a page can read without the record ever leaving your device. This page covers all of them, because the question a visitor asks is the same for each: what is being kept, and why.

On altuon.com a cookie does one of two jobs. It remembers a choice you made on the site so that you do not have to make it again, or it lets the operator into a page that is closed to everyone else while the site is under maintenance. There is no third job. Nothing stored on your device is used to build a profile of you, to measure you against other visitors or to recognise you on another website.

The site is static. Every page is built in advance and served as a finished file, and no page reads a cookie on the server to decide what to send you. The cookies below are read only by a small script in your browser, after the page has arrived, and by the maintenance gate when it is active.

Three items can be stored, and in ordinary use only the first of them is. Each is listed with its name, its purpose and how long it lasts.

• altuon_region. Functional. Records the region you chose in the region switch: DACH, MENA or North America. The site uses it to set the default currency on the proposal form, to route a contact message to the team for that region, to display times in that region's time zone and to bring regional material forward on pages that carry it. It is set only when you make the choice yourself and is never inferred from your IP address, your language or anything else about your connection. It lasts twelve months from the day you set it. Until you choose, the site treats you as having no region and shows every regional module in its default order.
• altuon_consent. Functional. Records the consent choice you made in the consent layer, so that the layer does not ask you again on every page. It is set only when the operator has enabled a non-essential service that needs consent, which today means an analytics provider; while no such service is configured, the consent layer does not appear and this cookie is not created. It lasts twelve months. Its content is your choice and the date you made it, nothing more.
• A maintenance-access cookie. Functional. Used only during the periods when the site is closed for maintenance and shows a holding page. It allows the operator to pass the holding page and review the site before it reopens. Visitors never receive it. It lasts for the browser session and is discarded when the browser is closed.

Every cookie set by the site is a first-party cookie: it is set by altuon.com and read only by altuon.com. None of them is sent to any other domain.

It is easier to trust a list of cookies when the list of absences is just as clear. altuon.com does not do any of the following.

• It sets no advertising cookies and takes part in no advertising network, auction or audience programme.
• It loads no tracking pixels, conversion tags or social media buttons that report your visit to another company.
• It does not follow you across other websites, and it does not accept identifiers set by other websites.
• It does not detect your location from your IP address. The region you see is the one you chose, and the language you read is the one in the address you visited.
• It does not use local storage or session storage for tracking. Nothing is written to either of them to identify you or to record where you have been.
• It does not fingerprint your browser. No script reads your screen, your installed fonts, your hardware or your plugins to build an identifier.
• It loads no fonts from a font provider. The typefaces are served from the same place as the pages, so no font company learns that you visited.
• It embeds no third-party content. There are no embedded videos, maps, calendars or forms hosted elsewhere that would set their own cookies when a page loads. Where the site offers to open a calendar for booking, it does so by a link that you choose to follow, and that service's own notice applies from the moment you leave.

The region cookie and the maintenance cookie are functional cookies. Each exists to deliver something you asked for, either by choosing a region or by being the operator opening a closed site, and each is exempt from the consent requirement under the ePrivacy rules and their Italian implementation. No banner is needed for them and none is shown.

The consent cookie appears only when there is something to consent to. If the operator enables a non-essential service, a consent layer is added to the site that explains the service, names its provider and offers you a clear choice between accepting and declining. Declining is as easy as accepting, and nothing about the site changes if you decline. Your choice is recorded in altuon_consent so that you are not asked again, and no script belonging to the service loads until you have accepted. You can change your choice at any time by deleting the cookie, which brings the consent layer back on your next visit.

While no non-essential service is configured, there is no consent layer, because asking you to consent to nothing would be theatre. The absence of a banner on this site is the honest state, not an oversight.

Analytics are switched off by default and are off today. The site is built so that the operator can enable one of two privacy-preserving providers, Vercel Analytics or Plausible, without changing anything else. Both count page views in aggregate and neither builds a profile of an individual visitor or follows a visitor to another website.

If one of them is enabled, three things happen before a single analytics script loads. This page is updated to name the provider, describe what it collects and state where it processes the data. The privacy notice is updated in the same way. And the consent layer appears, so that the script runs only after you have accepted it. The effective date at the top of this page changes at the same time, and the change is announced on the page.

Until all three have happened, you can take it that no analytics provider is receiving anything about your visit.

You do not need to block anything to use this site, and nothing on it stops working if you do. All modern browsers let you see the cookies a site has set, delete some or all of them and block a site from setting more. The setting is usually under privacy or site data in the browser's preferences, and each browser's help pages explain where.

If you delete altuon_region, the site forgets your region and returns to the default order until you choose again. If you delete altuon_consent, the consent layer reappears on your next visit, if there is a service to consent to. If you block cookies from altuon.com altogether, your region cannot be remembered between visits, and the consent layer, when present, will ask you on every visit. Nothing else changes: every page, every form and every language remain available.

The site does not respond differently to the Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signals, because there is nothing running that those signals would switch off. If that changes, this page will say how the signals are treated.

The effective date at the top of this page is the date the text was last changed. The list of cookies is kept in the same repository as the code that sets them, and a cookie cannot be added or removed without this page changing in the same release. When a change matters to you, in particular when a non-essential service is enabled and the consent layer appears for the first time, the change is announced on this page for a period after it takes effect. Questions about anything stored on your device can be sent to the contact given at the end of this page.