A cookie is a small file a website stores in your browser. www.hsef.in uses as few as possible and no advertising or third-party tracking cookies.
Cookies on www.hsef.in
| Name | Purpose | Lasts | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
hsef_sid | Keeps you signed in and protects forms from forgery. | Until you close the browser | Essential |
hsef_consent | Remembers your cookie choice, for every *.hsef.in site. | 180 days | Essential |
hsef_support_<app> (browser storage, not a cookie) | Only if you ask for help from an app without being signed in: keeps the private links to your requests in that browser so "My requests" can show them. Clear it with your browser's site data. | Until cleared | Essential |
hsef_vid | Only if you choose "Allow visit counting": a random number that lets us tell one visit from the next and see which HSEF sites a browser moves between. It contains nothing about you, and we store only a scrambled (keyed hash) form of it. | 13 months from your last visit | Analytics (only with your consent) |
hsef_install | Used only while the site is being installed. | Until you close the browser | Essential |
Visit counting
Every HSEF site (www.hsef.in and the apps on *.hsef.in) loads one small counter script from www.hsef.in. It counts page views on our own server; no Google or other outside service is involved and nothing is shared with advertisers.
- Without your consent (no choice yet, "Essential only", or a browser that sends Do Not Track / Global Privacy Control): each page view is counted with no cookie and no identifier — only the page, the site that linked to it, the browser type and an approximate place.
- With "Allow visit counting": the
hsef_vidcookie above is added, so we can also count visits, returning visitors and time on page, and see movement between HSEF sites. - Your IP address is used only at that moment, to look up the country, state and city (from the free DB-IP database kept on our server), and is then discarded. It is never stored.
- Page addresses are stored without anything after "?" (except campaign tags), and numbers in addresses (record numbers, private links) are removed.
Your choice
Change your choice at any time: . You can also delete cookies in your browser settings.
The individual HSEF applications set their own sign-in cookies; their notices describe them.