the short version
Five cookies, all of them ours, none of them advertising. This page lists every single one, what it holds, and how long it stays. Your choice is recorded so we know how many people accepted and how many declined — and you can change it at the bottom of this page whenever you like.
CopperOS sets a small number of first-party cookies — meaning they are set by copperos.org and sent nowhere else. There are no advertising cookies, no third-party trackers, no social embeds, and no cross-site profiling. We do not sell, rent, or share what we collect. When you make a choice in the notice, we store that choice in your browser and record it on our side, so the project can see how many visitors accepted and how many declined.
These cannot be switched off. Two of them exist purely so that declining is possible — remembering a refusal still requires remembering something.
Your discussions sign-in is worth mentioning here too: the account token is kept in your browser's local storage rather than a cookie, which means it is never attached to a network request automatically. Signing out or clearing site data removes it.
Remembers small things you chose yourself — which download you used last, whether a menu was open, where you were on a long page. Purely convenience. If you decline, the site behaves as though every visit is your first, which is only mildly annoying.
Counts how often a given page produces an error, so the Why did this happen? page can be written about problems people actually hit rather than problems we imagined. Counts only — no session recording, no mouse tracking, no profile.
So there are no surprises, here is the complete list of what is stored when you press Accept or Decline:
copperos_vid — shown to administrators in shortened form.Your IP address is not stored against your consent record. Where the site does need to recognise a repeat visitor — rate-limiting failed admin logins, for instance — it stores a salted one-way hash rather than the address itself.
Declining leaves the whole site working: every page, every download, discussions, support. You will see no reduced version of CopperOS, and you will not be asked again unless the cookie holding your answer disappears.
You can also clear cookies for copperos.org in your browser at any time. That erases your recorded answer along with everything else, and the notice will appear on your next visit as if you had never been here.