No cookie banner
1time.io does not ask permission to track you, because it does not track you.
What the rule actually says
The law people call "the cookie law" is Article 5(3) of the EU ePrivacy Directive, and it never mentions cookies. It governs "the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user."
Information on your device. Not cookies specifically — local storage, session storage, IndexedDB, cache entries, fingerprinting scripts. The mechanism is irrelevant.
It allows two exemptions: storage strictly necessary to transmit a communication, and storage strictly necessary to deliver a service you explicitly asked for. Everything else needs your consent.
Which means the banner was never the point
If the rule is about putting things on your device, there are two ways to satisfy it. Ask permission, or put nothing there.
Almost the entire web chose to ask. That is why you dismiss a dialog on every site you visit, and why "reject all" so often sits three clicks behind "accept all". The banner does not prevent tracking — it requests it, and most people click yes because the dialog exists to be cleared rather than read.
A consent banner is a confession with a checkbox.
We chose the other option
1time.io puts nothing on your device for our benefit. No cookies, not even a session cookie. No analytics scripts. No third-party requests at all, so no CDN, ad network or font host ever learns that you were here.
There is nothing to ask you about, so we do not ask.
What we gave up to keep it that way
This is not free, and it is worth being specific about the cost rather than claiming there isn't one.
We would like to know how many people who send a secret come back and send another. It is the most useful number we could have for deciding what to build next. The honest way to measure it is to put an anonymous marker in your browser — no name, no email, no profile, nothing that identifies you, just a random string that distinguishes a returning browser from a new one.
Article 5(3) has no exemption for anonymity. It is about your device, not about whether we could identify you. An anonymous marker, stored for our analytics, would have required a consent banner.
So we do not have that number. What we have is a floor: we can see that repeat use is rising, and we cannot tell you precisely how fast, because our only signal is a coarse server-side one that loses anyone who changes network. We decided that was the better trade.
What we do know, and how
Server logs. IP address, timestamp, path and user agent, kept up to 14 days for security and abuse prevention. Never secret content, never decryption keys.
Aggregate counters. Total secrets shared, and page visits by category. Plain numbers with no identifiers attached and no way to link a count to a person.
That is the whole of it. There is no third source.
What your browser does store
One thing, and only if you use it. If you open My Secrets, your browser keeps a local list of the links you created — their ids and timestamps. Never the secrets themselves, and never the decryption keys, which we could not read in any case.
That list never leaves your device. We cannot see it. Clearing it deletes nothing on our side. This is exactly the case the second exemption exists for: storage that is the service you asked for.
The position
Consent banners made surveillance polite. They did not make it rare.
The alternative was always available: build the thing so there is nothing to disclose. It is harder, it costs you measurements you would genuinely like to have, and it means you sometimes cannot answer questions about your own users. We think that is the correct price.