Cookie notice

1.1

No cookie is placed by this website. Nothing goes into local storage, session storage or IndexedDB. There is no analytics package, no tag manager, no advertising pixel, no session recorder, no heat map, no embedded social widget and no permission dialogue.

1.2

One request nevertheless leaves your browser for a party other than this company. Your browser asks Google's font service for two families, and in asking discloses your network address to it. That request is the entire external surface of the site, and clause 5 describes it rather than burying it.

2.1

A cookie is a fragment of data a site hands to your browser and asks to have handed back on later visits. It is the oldest device for making a protocol that forgets behave as though it remembers, and it is why a shopping basket survives a page load.

2.2

This notice therefore covers the whole family.

• Local and session storage. Larger stores held by the browser. One persists until cleared; the other ends with the tab.
• IndexedDB. A structured store in the browser, capable of holding a great deal more.
• The cache. Copies kept so a second page arrives faster. Cache timing has served as a covert identifier.
• Pixels and beacons. An image or a script request whose only work is to tell an outside party that a page loaded.
• Fingerprinting. Assembling a probable identifier out of fonts, screen dimensions, time zone, hardware and behaviour, storing nothing whatever.
• Server logs. Not on your device, but they hold your address and what you asked for.

3.1

Nothing. Every page at ailaw.im is a static file. No application runs behind them, and there is no session, no login, no basket, no preference worth remembering and no consent state to record. A cookie here would have no work to do.

3.3

Every line of that table can be checked from outside. Open the developer tools, watch the storage and network panels, reload the page. Direct observation beats a paragraph of assurance from the party being assured about.

4.1

One script runs on this website. It comes from this domain, runs to about a hundred lines, and does two things.

• It marks the page so the stylesheet may fold the navigation into a button on a narrow screen, and it opens and shuts that menu when the button is pressed.
• It marks the page a second time so sections may fade in as they are scrolled to, having first confirmed that your browser supports the observer it relies on and that you have not asked for reduced motion.

4.2

Both behaviours fail open. Should the script not load, or be blocked, or rely on something your browser lacks, every section of every page remains visible and every navigation link remains in the header. Nothing on this site hides behind working JavaScript.

The script issues no request over the network, reads no cookie, writes no storage and sends nothing anywhere.

5.1

Here is the one point at which something leaves your browser for an outside party, so it takes a clause of its own rather than a footnote.

These pages call for Vollkorn and Overpass Mono. Your browser fetches a short stylesheet from fonts.googleapis.com, then the font files themselves from fonts.gstatic.com.

5.3

Serving the fonts from this domain would end the disclosure altogether. It is on the list of things to do, and this notice is corrected on the day it happens. Calling a convenience a considered decision would be the dishonest version of this paragraph.

Until then, three ways to prevent the request. Block the two font domains in a content blocker. Turn off downloadable fonts, where your browser allows it. Or use a browser or profile that blocks third party requests generally. The pages remain entirely usable: text falls back to Georgia and a system monospace, the layout is unchanged, and nothing here detects, discourages or reacts to a blocked font.

6.1

Strictly, logs sit outside the subject of a cookie notice, being held on a server rather than on your device. They appear here because they are the only other place a record of your visit exists, and omitting them would leave this page accurate and misleading at once.

A hosting and delivery provider serves the static files, and, like every web server, records the requests. A line ordinarily carries the hour, the address the request came from, the path, the status returned, the user agent and the referring page.

6.2

• The provider holds them, on the provider's own schedule rather than this company's.
• They are not read as a matter of routine, not exported, not joined to any other data and not made into a profile.
• They exist so that a provider may run a service, absorb an attack and look into abuse.

A network address can amount to personal information under Australian law where a person is reasonably identifiable from it, whether alone or alongside something else. The privacy policy treats it as personal information for that reason.

7.1

Nearly every site of this kind carries a measurement package. This one carries none, and the reasoning is worth putting down.

Measurement answers questions about behaviour in aggregate, and it gets there by watching individuals. On a site with no funnel to tune and no advertising to attribute, the only real gain is curiosity about how many people read a page. Curiosity is not sufficient warrant for loading an outside script into a stranger's browser.

7.2

A second reason belongs to this company in particular. Its customers are law practices, and a practitioner opening this page may well be turning over a client matter while doing it. Reporting that visit to a measurement vendor would be a poor advertisement for a company asking to be trusted near legal documents.

Should measurement ever be added, it will be first party, cookieless, aggregate, with nothing that follows anybody between sites. This page will describe it before it starts, and the recipient will appear in the table in the privacy policy.

8.1

No permission dialogue interrupts this site, and the omission is deliberate.

The dialogue most readers recognise descends from European law, principally the ePrivacy Directive, which requires consent before information is stored on or read from a device unless it is strictly necessary. No Australian counterpart exists. What binds this company is the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the principles in Schedule 1 to it.

8.2

• APP 3 permits collection only where it is reasonably necessary for a function or activity of the entity, by lawful and fair means. Collecting nothing satisfies that by subtraction rather than by argument.
• APP 5 requires notice of the matters it lists. This page and the privacy policy are that notice.
• The Commissioner's guidance treats an identifier held on a device as personal information where a person is reasonably identifiable from it. Storing none avoids the question entirely.

A dialogue seeking leave to do nothing would be theatre. Worse, it trains readers to dismiss consent dialogues unread, which is a small harm the industry has inflicted at enormous scale. Should this site ever store something not strictly necessary, consent will be sought properly, before the storing, with a refusal that leaves the site entirely usable.

9.1

Although these pages store nothing, you may want a firmer setting for everywhere else. Every current browser keeps the controls under its privacy settings, where cookies and site data can be cleared, restricted to the site being visited, or blocked outright. A private window discards storage when it closes. A content blocker gives finer control still, the font domains at clause 5.1 included.

9.2

Blocking everything from this site costs you nothing. No feature here depends on storage, so nothing degrades and no message appears asking you to reconsider.

10.1

Two signals are worth a clause, since a notice ignoring them is usually concealing something.

The older is a header asking sites not to track the person browsing. It never acquired legal force in this country and most sites disregard it. Honouring it here would change nothing, there being no tracking to suspend with the header or without it.

10.2

The later signal, Global Privacy Control, operates in some jurisdictions as an effective withdrawal from the selling and sharing of personal information. This company sells nothing and shares nothing for cross context behavioural advertising, so the signal has nothing here to switch off. Were that ever to change, the signal would be honoured and this clause would say by what mechanism.

11.1

An undertaking is worth something only if a departure from it becomes visible.

• Should this site ever issue a cookie, use storage, add measurement or admit any outside script, this page is amended before the change goes live rather than after it.
• The effective date and version in the heading move with the amendment, and a note sits above the heading for a minimum of 30 days.
• Where consent is genuinely required it is sought before anything is stored, and declining leaves the site entirely usable.
• Any new recipient also appears in the recipients table in the privacy policy, which remains the single authoritative list.

11.2

Superseded versions of this notice are not published as separate pages, but they are kept. Ask what this page said on a given date and that version will be sent to you.

12.1

Questions about anything here go to hello@ailaw.im. Use the subject line Privacy request for a formal answer inside 30 days, or anything sensible if you simply want to ask.

12.2

If this page turns out to be wrong, that is a defect and the company wants to hear about it. Say what you observed and by what means. The page is either corrected, or you are told why the observation shows something other than it appears to. Nobody here will argue with a network trace.

12.3

Entity: AI-LAW PTY LTD, ACN 698 421 608, ABN 23 698 421 608, a proprietary company limited by shares in Western Australia.

No postal address is published here. Where a document must be served, ASIC holds the company's registered office against ACN 698 421 608, and service is properly effected at the office that register shows.

A complaint may also go straight to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), GPO Box 5218, Sydney NSW 2001, telephone 1300 363 992, oaic.gov.au, which charges nothing to receive one and needs no agreement from this company.