Cookie policy
This site sets no cookies of its own. It stores three small items in your browser's local storage — your clock format and your two weekly grids — which never travel to a server. Cookies on this domain come from Google AdSense and Google's consent management, and only for advertising. Use the Cookie settings button in the footer to change your choice whenever you like.
This policy describes every way hourscalculatoronline.com stores or reads information on your device. It sits alongside our privacy policy, which covers the wider picture of what we do and do not know about you. beFortunate, a company based in the Netherlands that builds focused, practical online tools, operates the site.
Cookies and local storage are not the same thing
The distinction matters here, because this site uses one and not the other.
A cookie is a small file your browser attaches to every request it makes to the domain that set it. That automatic transmission is what makes cookies useful for sessions and advertising, and also what makes them a privacy concern: the data travels.
Local storage is a store your browser keeps for a single site. Nothing in it is attached to requests; it is readable only by code running on this site, on your device. Data placed there stays on the machine you are sitting at unless a script explicitly sends it somewhere — and ours does not.
Our own features use local storage exclusively. We set no first-party cookies for any purpose: no session cookie, no preference cookie, no analytics cookie. The cookies you may find on this domain are set by Google, described further down.
What this site stores on your device
Three keys, all in local storage, all written by the site's own JavaScript.
| Key | Type | What it holds and why |
|---|---|---|
hco.format | Local storage | Either a 12-hour or 24-hour clock preference. Without it, the toggle would reset on every page view and on every reload. |
hco.timecard.timecard | Local storage | The in times, out times and break minutes you entered on the time card calculator, so a reload or a stray back button does not discard a week of typing. |
hco.timecard.timesheet | Local storage | The same information for the timesheet calculator. The two tools use separate keys so you can keep a different week in each. |
Nothing else is written, and the list is complete rather than illustrative. None of it is used for tracking, profiling, advertising or measurement, and none of it is shared with anyone. It has no expiry date because it is not a cookie; it persists until you remove it.
Every write is wrapped in error handling. If storage is unavailable — private browsing in some browsers, a strict blocking setting, a full quota — the calculators keep working and simply stop remembering between visits.
Cookies set by Google for advertising
The site is free, with no paywall and no premium tier, and is funded by advertising through Google AdSense (publisher ID ca-pub-0745848274612756). AdSense, together with Google's own consent management (Funding Choices, implementing Consent Mode v2), is the only third-party code loaded anywhere on the site. It is requested from pagead2.googlesyndication.com.
Google and its advertising partners may set cookies and read device identifiers in your browser to:
- choose which advertisements to show you;
- limit how often you see the same advertisement (frequency capping);
- measure impressions and clicks, and report them to advertisers;
- detect invalid traffic, click fraud and abuse;
- remember the advertising consent choice you made.
These cookies are set by Google under its own policies, not ours, and Google acts as an independent controller for that data. The authoritative descriptions — including current cookie names and lifetimes, which Google may change without reference to us — are here:
- How Google uses cookies in advertising
- Google Privacy Policy
- How Google uses information from sites that use its services
- Google My Ad Center — control the ads you are shown
We deliberately do not reproduce a table of Google cookie names and durations here: such a snapshot silently goes stale, and is worse than a link to a source kept current.
We receive none of this data. Our view of it is the aggregate AdSense report — impressions, clicks and revenue by page and country — with nothing that identifies a visitor.
Consent: what happens before and after you choose
If you are in the EU or EEA, or another region where consent is required, Google's consent dialog is shown before advertising cookies used for personalisation are set.
Before you consent, non-personalised advertisements are served. These are chosen from general context — broadly, that you are reading a page about working hours — rather than from any profile of your interests or browsing history. Non-personalised advertising still involves limited technical data for frequency capping, measurement and fraud prevention, and may still use storage on your device for those purposes.
If you consent, Google and its partners may use cookies and identifiers to personalise advertising and measure it in more detail, as set out in their policies.
If you decline, advertising continues but stays non-personalised. Declining does not remove ads, and it does not restrict any calculator: every tool on this site works identically either way, with no feature held back and no nag screen. We have no mechanism to treat a visitor differently based on their consent choice, and would not want one.
Consent Mode v2 means Google's tags adjust their own behaviour according to the signal recorded by the dialog. Your choice is remembered so that you are not asked on every page.
Changing or withdrawing your choice
The Cookie settings button in the footer of every page reopens Google's consent dialog, where you can grant or withdraw consent per purpose. You can do this as often as you like, and a withdrawal takes effect for subsequent ad requests.
Your browser gives you broader controls that work regardless of any dialog:
- Block or delete third-party cookies for this domain, or for all sites, in your browser's privacy settings.
- Clear site data for hourscalculatoronline.com. This removes Google's cookies and our three local-storage keys, so your clock preference resets to the default and any saved weeks are discarded.
- Use Google My Ad Center to adjust personalisation across every Google service at once.
- Use private or incognito browsing, which discards cookies and storage when you close the window.
On the weekly tools there is also a Clear week button, which empties the grid and its stored copy without touching your clock preference.
What we do not use
Worth stating plainly, because many sites that publish a policy like this do use them. There is no Google Analytics on this site at launch. There are no advertising or social pixels, no heatmaps, no session recording, no A/B testing service, no chat widget, no social media embeds, no externally hosted fonts and no content delivery network loading third-party scripts. The calculators themselves make no network requests at all.
If an analytics tool is ever added, it will be placed behind the same consent mechanism, and this page and the privacy policy will be updated before it is deployed rather than afterwards.
The embeddable widget
The ad-free widget at /embed/, which other sites may place in an iframe, loads no advertising code and therefore sets no advertising cookies. It runs the same calculation code and uses the same clock-format preference. If you meet the widget embedded on someone else's website, that site's own cookie policy governs whatever it does; we have no control over the page surrounding our iframe.
How this interacts with your rights
Because the data at stake is Google's rather than ours, a request to access or erase advertising data must be addressed to Google. We hold nothing to retrieve: no account, no profile, no analytics record, and no server access log — the nginx access log is switched off. The privacy policy sets out GDPR rights in full, including the right to complain to a supervisory authority, which in the Netherlands is the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.
Email you send us is covered separately in the privacy policy. If something here is unclear or appears to contradict what you observe in your browser's developer tools, we would like to know. Write to [email protected] and we will either explain it or correct the page. This policy was last reviewed 1 November 2026.