Cookie Policy

Effective: August 8, 2026
Last reviewed: September 9, 2026

Hook the Horizon carries advertising and sells Field Decks. That is how the writing gets paid for, and it means the site sets cookies. This page says which ones, whose they are, and how to turn off the ones you can turn off. The register at the bottom is generated from what the site itself records, so it is current rather than remembered.

Strictly necessary. These keep the site working — they remember the choice you made in the banner, hold a session together between pages, and keep a purchase attached to you long enough to hand you the download. They are set whatever you choose here, because without them nothing works.

Statistics. These count visits and tell us which pages actually get read, in aggregate. They’re how we’d know, say, whether the ice-fishing pages get read in December or in March. They stay off until you accept them, and declining them costs you nothing except our count.

Commerce. When you buy a Field Deck, the checkout and its payment provider set cookies to keep the order together and to catch fraud. They are set when you start a purchase, not while you are reading.

Advertising. Display advertising here comes through Google AdSense, and the publisher account is declared publicly at hookthehorizon.blog/ads.txt. Google sets cookies through that code to cap how often you see the same advertisement and to record whether one was seen or clicked. Where personalization has not been switched off, those cookies also decide which advertisement gets selected, using activity Google recorded elsewhere on the web.

Those cookies belong to Google, not to this site, which is why their names and durations are Google’s to publish and to change, and why they do not appear in the register below — that only lists what this site sets itself. Google keeps the current list on its own advertising technologies page.

Turning advertising cookies off. Three controls actually work. Google’s ad settings switch off personalized advertising for your account or for the browser you are in. Blocking third-party cookies in your browser stops them being set here at all. And the preferences panel in the banner lets you refuse categories directly. Switching personalization off does not remove the advertising. It stops the advertising being about you.

Readers in the UK, the EEA and Switzerland are covered by Google’s regional consent defaults, which withhold advertising storage until a consent signal has been recorded.

Spam protection. Akismet checks comments and form submissions for spam signals. Without it the contact form fills with garbage inside a week.

What none of this does. No cookie here is used to work out where you fish. Location privacy is a standing rule on this site and it is not undone by the analytics; see Conservation and Location Privacy.

Changing your mind. Use the cookie settings link in the footer at any time. Clearing your browser’s site data for hookthehorizon.blog clears every choice recorded here, which means the banner will ask again.

Questions. Write through the Hook Us page. The full privacy policy covers what happens to anything the site collects.