Cookie Policy

Cookies and local storage are small pieces of data stored in your browser. We use a small number of them to keep you signed in and remember your preferences. We do not run product analytics that identify a device or account; the only usage measurement is cookieless aggregate measurement, described in section 4. This policy is part of, and should be read with, our Privacy Policy.

These are required for the Service to work.

• Authentication (Clerk): session cookies (such as __session and __client_uat) that keep you signed in and secure your session.
• Bot protection (Cloudflare Turnstile): used by Clerk on our sign-in and sign-up pages to tell real visitors from automated ones. It may set its own cookies in your browser as part of that check.
• Access gate: a rip_hold_stealth cookie, set only while the site is running in restricted-access mode (used before public launch, and available again if we ever need to gate access during maintenance or a staged rollout). It holds an access token and no personal data. It is not set during normal public browsing; if your browser still has one, it expires on its own and clearing your cookies removes it immediately.

These remember preferences or recent activity on your own device. They are stored in your browser’s local storage and are not sent to an analytics provider or used for cross-site tracking. Clearing local storage resets the corresponding feature on that device.

• theme: your light/dark appearance preference.
• rh:dashboard-sections: which dashboard sections you have collapsed or expanded.
• rh:welcome-dismissed: whether you dismissed the dashboard welcome message.
• rh:card-picker-recent-searches: up to three card-search queries you recently used in the thesis card picker, so you can repeat them on that device. You can clear this list from the picker.
• rh:profile-setup-dismissed: whether you dismissed the profile-setup prompt shown when you write your first thesis call.

One further key, rh:admin-secret, is used only if an authorized operator opens the internal forms-mapping review page and manually supplies the separate admin secret. It is sent only with requests from that internal tool and does not appear in normal product use.

We do not use analytics cookies or a product-analytics tracker. The only usage measurement is Vercel Analytics & Speed Insights: aggregate traffic and performance measurement that is cookieless, stores no persistent identifier, and measures page volume and load performance rather than individuals.

If you used the site while it still ran a product-analytics tool and accepted it then, any leftover ph_* cookies or storage entries in your browser are no longer read by anything and expire on their own; clearing your cookies removes them immediately.

Our sign-in provider (Clerk) sends its own SDK usage telemetry to its servers. That is Clerk measuring its software, not us measuring you: it is not linked to your Rip & Hold activity and we receive nothing from it.

Two things are worth naming here even though they are not analytics. Neither sets a cookie. First, feature activity that is part of the Service itself (completing a challenge, publishing a thesis call, or advancing your Collector XP history) is recorded on our servers when the action happens, as part of operating the Service. Second, if something on a page tries to load from a source our security policy blocks, your browser reports it and we record a minimal entry in our server logs; the Privacy Policy describes exactly what that record contains.

We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and we do not sell or share your personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising.

You can manage or delete cookies through your browser settings. Because we set no analytics or advertising cookies, there is nothing further to opt out of on the site itself. Blocking strictly necessary cookies may prevent parts of the Service (such as staying signed in) from working.

For more about how we handle personal information, see our Privacy Policy. Questions? Contact us at contact@ripandhold.com.