Privacy and cookies

Measurement is handled by HEKNO Analytics, the first-party platform shared across HEKNO products. The events we record are a fixed, deliberately short list:

• Which pages are viewed, and which section of a long page.
• That a search ran, how many results it returned, and which result was chosen — but never what was typed.
• Which pairings, substitutes and comparisons are explored.
• Which tools are used, and whether they produced an answer.
• Whether a page was shared.

No free text is collected at all.Search is the only place you can type something into SpiceHQ, and what you type never leaves your browser. What we record instead is the shape of the search: that one happened, how many results came back, whether any did, and which one you opened. A random identifier links those together for the length of a single search so that “searches that found nothing” is answerable. It is generated fresh each time, never stored, and never reused.

This is a deliberate constraint rather than an oversight. Knowing which questions people have is genuinely how we decide what to build next, and we have chosen to work that out from which pages get read rather than from reading what people type. The platform we use supports sending raw search text and requires a documented decision to switch it on. Ours is to leave it off.

• No advertising cookies, and no advertising features.
• No cross-site tracking, and no advertising profile built about you.
• No account, and no data collected that could identify you personally.
• No sale or sharing of data with advertisers.
• No search terms, and no other free text.
• No device fingerprinting.

Any identifier we use is a random value generated in your browser; none of it is derived from your address, your device or anything about you.

If you agree to measurement, SpiceHQ loads Google Analytics. That is a third-party script, and it is the one place where something about your visit reaches a company other than us, so it is worth being exact about what it does and does not do.

Nothing loads until you agree. If you decline, or before you have chosen, the script is never requested, no Google cookie is set, and no request reaches Google at all. It is absent rather than present and idle. If you change your mind later, measurement stops.

Your searches are not sent.SpiceHQ’s search runs at an address containing what you typed. We strip the query from the address before it is reported, so Google receives the fact that the search page was viewed and never what was typed into it. This is the same rule applied throughout the site and it is the one we would most regret getting wrong.

What Google does receive is ordinary web measurement: which pages were viewed and in what order, roughly where in the world the visit came from, which browser and device category was used, and which site referred you. It sets a first-party cookie containing a random identifier so that repeat visits can be counted as one visitor rather than several.

Advertising features are switched off. Google Signals and ad personalisation are both disabled in our configuration, so your visit is not used to build an advertising profile and is not joined to your activity on other sites for advertising purposes.

The platform’s documented default is to keep events for 90 days and then purge them. We state that as the platform’s default rather than as a promise about a live system, because SpiceHQ is not deployed and no measurement has ever run. When it does, this section will state what is actually configured.

Your decision is kept in your browser’s local storage under a single key. It is not a cookie and is never sent to a server — it exists only so we do not ask you again on your next visit. Clearing your browser data removes it, and you will simply be asked once more.

Where SpiceHQ shows a commercial recommendation, it is labelled as commercial and is resolved on our servers rather than by a script in your browser. Nothing is loaded from a retailer or an advertising network into this page. Commercial recommendations never influence the evidence, grading or conclusions of anything you read here, and they are excluded entirely from safety content.

At present no monetisation provider is configured, so no commercial content appears at all. Nor has any measurement ever been collected: SpiceHQ is not published, and no analytics service is configured either. This page describes what would happen if you consented once both were switched on.