Cookies

Last updated 16 October 2026

Ticked sets no cookies. Not necessary ones, not analytics ones, not advertising ones. The one thing the site keeps on your device is a single date, used only to count how many people come back — it is described below, with a switch to turn it off.

That is why you have not been shown a cookie banner. The law requires consent for storing or accessing information on your device, except in a few cases. One is information used only to produce statistics about how a site is used, so that it can be improved, provided you are told what it is and can object, simply and for free. The date is used for exactly that and for nothing else.

What is stored on your device, exactly?

One date, in your browser's local storage, named ticked.lastWeek: the Monday of the last week in which you opened a worksheet page, such as 2026-09-28. The first time you open a worksheet page in a new week, the page works out how long it has been since that Monday and sends our tally one of four labels — new, last week, two to four weeks, or five weeks or more — and then stores this week's Monday in its place. That happens at most once a week.

The date itself never leaves your browser; only the label is sent. Nothing else about your visits is kept: no identifier, no count of visits, no other date. It tells us how many people come back, and it identifies no one.

It stays until a visit in a later week replaces it, or until you clear this site's data in your browser. Safari removes it by itself if you do not visit for about a week, so in Safari a return after a longer gap is counted as new.

If you press Don't count my visits below, the date is deleted and one other value is stored instead, ticked.nocount. It records only that you asked not to be counted, so that the site can keep honouring it. Nothing else is written to your device, and nothing else is read from it.

What about everything else?

Your worksheet options are held in the page's address bar while you are on it — that is what lets you share a link to a particular sheet — and are forgotten the moment you close the tab. They are never written to your device.

The practice times tables check keeps nothing either. Its questions, the answers typed and the results exist only in the page while it is open, and are gone when you leave or reload. It writes nothing to your device and does not take part in the weekly count above; the one thing it reads is the "Don't count my visits" choice below, if you have made it, so that it can honour it.

Nor does the practice sheet it offers at the end. That sheet opens on the Year 4 times tables page, which stores no date and sends no weekly count when it is showing a practice sheet, and it carries the facts to practise in the part of the link after the #, which your browser keeps to itself and never sends to us.

The same goes for the weekly-email box on the year pages: the address you type there goes to our email provider, not to your device — the privacy policy says what happens to it. Nothing here remembers that you signed up, which is why the box is still there next time.

When you make, print or download a sheet, or open a link to one, we do count that it happened and which options were set, as a tally with nothing attached to it — the privacy policy sets out exactly what that records. The tally itself writes nothing to your device.

How does the analytics work without cookies?

Cloudflare Web Analytics counts a page view without identifying the visitor and without storing anything on your device. It cannot follow you across sites, and it cannot build a profile, because it has nowhere to keep one. It does process your IP address in transit, which the privacy policy explains. It is not loaded at all if your browser sends Global Privacy Control, or if you have switched the counting off below.

This was a deliberate choice over the more common analytics tools, which set cookies and would have obliged us to put a banner in front of a site whose whole promise is that you can print a worksheet in ten seconds without signing up for anything.

Switching the counting off

Press the switch below. The stored date is deleted straight away, and from the next page you open this browser sends no weekly count and no worksheet tally, a sign-up from it is not tallied, and the analytics script is not loaded.

Or turn on Global Privacy Control in your browser. In Firefox it is under Settings › Privacy & Security, as "Tell websites not to sell or share my data"; Brave sends it by default. While it is on, this site loads no analytics script, records no worksheet tally and stores no date, and deletes the date if one was already there. Adding ?notrack=1 to a page's address does the same for that page while it is open.

Global Privacy Control is the lasting way: your browser sends it with every page, so there is nothing for us to remember. The switch has to be remembered by your browser, and Safari forgets it, as it forgets everything a site stores, after about a week without a visit — if you use Safari, press it again when you come back.

What would have to change

Ticked is free to use and free of charge. If it is ever funded by advertising, that will change this page, because advertising technology stores and reads information on your device — even non-personalised advertising does, for frequency capping and fraud prevention. If that day comes:

• you will be asked for consent before any advertising code loads, not after;
• refusing will be exactly as easy, and as prominent, as accepting;
• this page and the privacy policy will be rewritten first, describing what is actually set and by whom.

Until then, the only thing to opt out of is the counting, and the switch above or Global Privacy Control does that.