Last updated: 30 September 2026
The short version
The only third-party advertising cookies here are those of the OpenAI measurement pixel, which tells OpenAI whether an ad shown in ChatGPT led to a subscription, and only with your consent where the law requires it. No Google Analytics, no social media pixels.
Some of our own cookies are essential: they keep you signed in and remember your language. The rest serve only to measure visits on our own servers — which pages are read and which ads bring people who end up subscribing.
Whether we ask first depends on where you are:
- In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, a banner asks you before anything that is not essential is set. Until you answer, we count your visit without storing anything on your device (see Counting visits without a cookie below).
- Everywhere else, the law does not require consent in advance, so the banner does not appear and the measurement cookie is set from the first page. You can say no at any time with the button at the end of this page.
We work out where you are from your IP address, on our own server, without calling any outside service.
Which ones
| Cookie | Purpose | Duration |
|---|---|---|
audiototexts_session | Keeps you signed in. It is httpOnly: the page's JavaScript cannot read it. | 30 days |
audiototexts_auth | Only indicates that a session exists, so the header can show the right button without waiting for a request. It cannot identify you. | 30 days |
audiototexts_guest | Lets you return to what you transcribed without an account. Without it, reloading the page would lose your transcript. | 7 days |
audiototexts_visitor | Measurement. Distinguishes one visit from another in our analytics, and remembers which ad brought you if you later subscribe. Only set with consent in Europe; outside Europe, until you say no. | 12 months |
audiototexts_consent | Remembers your answer to the cookie banner, so we don't ask again. | 12 months |
audiototexts_locale | Remembers the language you picked. | 12 months |
audiototexts_currency | Remembers the currency you see prices in. | 12 months |
__oppref | Advertising, set by OpenAI. Stores the identifier of the ChatGPT ad you clicked, so OpenAI can attribute a later subscription to it. Only set with consent in Europe; outside Europe, until you say no. | 30 days |
__obref | Advertising, set by OpenAI. A random browser reference used by OpenAI to match conversions to its ads. Same conditions as above. | 12 months |
For the session, guest and visitor cookies, we store a hash of the value in our database rather than the value itself. Even someone with access to our database could not reconstruct the cookie.
Counting visits without a cookie
If you have not accepted measurement cookies, we still count your visit, but nothing is stored on your device. Instead, our server groups the pages of one visit using a one-way hash of your IP address, your browser's user agent and a secret that changes every day. The raw IP address is not stored, and because the secret rotates daily, the hash cannot be used to recognise you on another day.
Cookies set by other services
Three services may set their own cookies, and only where they are needed:
- Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that you are not a robot, on the transcription and sign-up screens. It replaces a traditional captcha and is specifically designed not to track anyone.
- Stripe, at checkout, for fraud prevention.
- OpenAI, through its measurement pixel for ChatGPT ads (the two
__cookies in the table above). It is loaded on every page, but only once you have accepted all cookies in Europe, or until you say no elsewhere.
If you do not visit the transcription, sign-up or checkout screens, Turnstile and Stripe are not loaded.
Changing your mind
The button at the end of this page opens the cookie choice again, wherever you are. Choosing Essential only removes the measurement cookie, tells the OpenAI pixel to delete its cookies, and we go back to counting visits without storing anything on your device.
How to remove them
Your browser lets you delete or block them. Note, however, that if you block the session cookies you will not be able to sign in — not because of any restriction on our part, but because the session is that cookie.
Questions
Write to support@audiototexts.com. Details of the data we process are in the privacy policy.