Cookie policy
What we set, when we set it, and how long it lasts.
Last updated: 21 August 2026.
This page lists everything that Siena & Toscana, and the two analytics providers we use, may store on your device. There are three states and they are genuinely different: before you answer the cookie notice, after you accept, and after you decline. We have set them out separately rather than summarising them, because the first one is the one most cookie policies leave out.
Before you answer the notice
Google Analytics does not load at all. Nothing is set for it, and no data reaches Google.
Microsoft Clarity does load, and it is told at the moment it starts that it may not use storage on your device. In that state it records how the page is used — where a page is scrolled, where it is clicked, where it is abandoned — but it sets none of its own identifying cookies, so one visit cannot be joined to another and you are not recognised when you come back. Microsoft describes this state as reduced: session recordings are fragmented and continuous user journeys are unavailable. That is the trade we have accepted in exchange for not storing an identifier on a device whose owner has not been asked yet.
Microsoft may still set its own cookies on its own domains. When the Clarity tag contacts Microsoft it is redirected through clarity.ms and bing.com, which set the identifiers listed as third-party in the table below — including one that lasts about thirteen months. Those are set by Microsoft under its own privacy statement, not by us, and they are not read by this site. We list them anyway, because they are set as a consequence of a tag we chose to run and you are entitled to know that before you decide.
We store nothing of our own at this stage. Your consent preference is written only once you have expressed one.
If you accept
Google Analytics 4 loads and sets _ga and _ga_<ID>. Clarity is upgraded to storage-permitted and may set _clck and _clsk, which let it recognise a returning visitor and join a session together. Your acceptance is recorded so we do not ask again.
If you decline
Clarity stops entirely — it is not loaded on any subsequent page, and if it was running before you answered, it is told to clear the cookies it had set. Google Analytics never loads. The only thing stored is your refusal, so that the notice does not reappear on every page.
Neither tool is ever loaded on preview or development builds of this site, whatever the consent state, so nothing collected there is mixed with real readers’ visits.
The full list
| Name | Purpose | Category | Duration | Set by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
st-cookie-consent | Remembers whether you accepted or declined analytics. Stored in your browser’s localStorage, not as a cookie. | Strictly necessary | Until you clear your browser’s data for this site | Siena & Toscana |
_ga | Distinguishes unique visitors for Google Analytics 4. | Analytics — consent required | 2 years | Google (first-party) |
_ga_<ID> | Maintains session state for Google Analytics 4. | Analytics — consent required | 2 years | Google (first-party) |
_clck | Persists a Clarity visitor identifier, so repeat visits are recognised as the same browser. | Analytics — consent required | 1 year | Microsoft Clarity (first-party) |
_clsk | Joins several page views into one Clarity session recording. | Analytics — consent required | 1 day | Microsoft Clarity (first-party) |
_cltk | A per-tab Clarity session token. Stored in sessionStorage, not as a cookie. | Analytics | Until you close the tab | Microsoft Clarity (first-party) |
MUID | Microsoft’s identifier for a browser across Microsoft sites, used by Microsoft for advertising, analytics and operational purposes. | Third-party — set by Microsoft | About 13 months | Microsoft, on clarity.ms and bing.com |
SRM_B | Microsoft’s companion identifier to MUID, set during the same redirect. | Third-party — set by Microsoft | About 13 months | Microsoft, on bing.com |
CLID | Records the first time Clarity saw this browser on any site using Clarity. Documented by Microsoft. | Third-party — set by Microsoft | Set by Microsoft; see its cookie list | Microsoft, on clarity.ms |
MR | Indicates whether MUID should be refreshed. | Third-party — set by Microsoft | 7 days | Microsoft, on bing.com |
ANONCHK | Records whether MUID is passed to Microsoft’s advertising identifier. Clarity does not use that identifier, so it is always zero. | Third-party — set by Microsoft | 10 minutes | Microsoft, on clarity.ms |
SM | Synchronises MUID between Microsoft domains. | Third-party — set by Microsoft | Session | Microsoft, on clarity.ms |
Microsoft maintains its own list of the cookies Clarity uses, which is the authoritative one and may change without us being told: Clarity cookies. Google’s equivalent is Google’s cookie usage.
What Clarity actually records
Clarity produces two things: heatmaps, which aggregate where readers click and how far down a page they get, and session recordings, which replay a visit as a reconstruction of the page with the pointer moving over it. A recording is not a video of your screen and does not use your camera, microphone or any other device on your machine. It captures the page we served you and what was done to it.
Anything typed into a form field is masked by Clarity in all of its masking modes and cannot be unmasked — Microsoft states that input content is masked in every mode and that this is not configurable. So a newsletter sign-up or a contact message is not readable in a recording. Clarity also derives an approximate location from your IP address, which is how it and we can tell a reader in Siena from one in London.
We use this to find pages that are broken rather than merely unpopular — a link nobody can hit on a phone, a table that scrolls off the screen, a guide people abandon halfway. Several of the fixes on this site came from exactly that.
Changing your mind
Use the Cookie settings link in the footer of any page. It clears your stored choice and brings the notice back, and you can answer it differently. Declining after having accepted also tells Clarity to clear the cookies it set.
Clearing your browser’s site data for sienatoscana.it has the same effect on our side. The third-party cookies in the table above are set on Microsoft’s domains rather than ours, so clearing data for this site alone will not remove them; your browser’s own cookie settings, or its third-party cookie blocking, will.
Where this sits in law
We rely on your consent for anything stored on your device for analytics. The cookieless collection described at the top of this page happens before you have given consent and is not covered by it; we rely on our legitimate interest in knowing whether the pages we publish work, balanced against the fact that no identifier is stored on your device and nothing you type is captured. You can object to it at any time by declining on the notice, which stops it completely.
For everything else — what personal data we hold, how long, who processes it, where it goes, and how to have it deleted — see the privacy policy.