Ten cookies. All of them do work you asked for.

TRACE stores six kinds of value in your browser's local storage, all of them display preferences, none of them ever sent to our servers.

The first is a flag recording that you dismissed the cookie notice, so it doesn't reappear on every page. The second exists only if you fold part of a board: folding a list or a swimlane on a Task board, or a column on the board view of tasks, deals, estimates or projects, writes down which ones you folded — an entry or two per board — so the board opens the way you left it. The third exists only if you fold a section on a record page — a company, a technician, an audit: it notes the kind of page and the section's heading, so that section stays folded on every record of that kind. It records the kind of page, never which record you were on. The fourth exists only if you take a test in TRACE — signed in or from a share link — and change the text size: it remembers the size you picked, and nothing about the test or your answers. The fifth exists only if you fold a getting-started checklist — the one on your dashboard, or the setup checklist a module shows at the top of its page (Safety, People, Projects, Tool Control, Ledger, CRM, Certification Testing, Quality Management and Training each have one): it notes which checklist you left folded, one entry per checklist, and nothing else. The sixth exists only if you switch one of the free NDT calculators between Metric and Imperial: it remembers which you chose, so the next calculator opens the same way. The choice also goes into the page address, so a link you share opens in the same units; the stored value holds that one word and nothing about what you calculated. Opening a calculator without choosing writes nothing. Hiding the dashboard's card altogether is different — that choice is saved on your account, so it follows you. Folding is per-device on purpose — folding your "Closed" list shouldn't fold it for a colleague — which is exactly why it lives in your browser rather than in our database.

One more value lives somewhere else — your browser's storage for a single tab — and it is the only one that does reach us. If you sign up with Google or Microsoft from a link carrying another firm's referral code, or an invitation to a workspace of your own, TRACE keeps that code in the tab while you are away at Google or Microsoft and sends it with the form you fill in when you come back, exactly as an email signup sends it. It holds the code and nothing about you, and it is gone when you close the tab.

Offline field reports are the one place TRACE keeps records in your browser, and only if you ask. A technician who presses "Make this computer available offline" on Field Reports, or a consultant who presses it on Reports, gets two things. A service worker, which keeps a copy of the offline reports page, TRACE's own scripts and styles, and three public font files so that page opens with no signal; it stores nothing about you and answers nothing else. And the browser's IndexedDB storage, which holds a copy of your jobs, report forms, draft reports, draft charge sheets (hours and quantities — never prices), your own hours of the last two months and your firm's name and logo (or, for a consultant, the firm's scheduled and in-progress jobs, its report forms, each job's crew with their certifications — names and certification facts only, no contact details — its technique library's names and wording and your own draft reports) — all deleted when you sign out, when someone else signs in on that computer, and after 14 days — and the reports, photos, charge sheets and hours you write offline, until they reach TRACE. All of it is encrypted under an offline passcode you choose, which TRACE never sees. Those are sent to TRACE when there is a signal — that is their purpose — and leave the computer once they arrive. A DRAFT PDF preview of a report is made in the browser's memory when you ask for it and is not stored by TRACE. To know whose stored reports to offer, the offline page reads the sign-in cookie described above, on your computer; it sends nothing on the strength of it.

TRACE loads no advertising scripts, analytics scripts, tracking pixels, social widgets, or fingerprinting tools. There are no third-party cookies on any TRACE page.

Two exceptions sit outside our pages, on the provider's own domain and under the provider's own policy. The signup page, the page where a brand-new Google or Microsoft sign-in sets up its workspace, the password sign-in box and the forgot-password page, the contact form on our home page, the survey, the giveaway entry page, the Advertise page's enquiry form, and a firm's public lead form embed Cloudflare Turnstile — a bot check that runs in a frame served by Cloudflare, which may store a short-lived value there to remember the check passed; Cloudflare designed Turnstile specifically to work without tracking cookies or visitor profiling. And Stripe hosts two pages you can be sent to, both of which set Stripe's cookies under Stripe's cookie policy: its checkout pages, where TRACE subscriptions are paid for and, if a firm turns on online payments, its clients pay invoices and buyers pay for the courses it sells; and its billing page, which your firm's primary contact opens from Account settings to change the card, pull past invoices, or correct the billing details Stripe prints on them. Likewise, choosing to sign in with Google or with Microsoft, and connecting your firm's QuickBooks Online company, your own Google or Microsoft 365 mailbox, or your firm's Stripe account, each takes you to that company's own sign-in and consent pages, which set their own cookies under their own policies.

Every browser lets you view, delete, and block cookies for a site, usually under privacy or site-data settings. Clearing TRACE's cookies signs you out and forgets this device's copy of your sidebar and Light-or-Dark preferences and, for technicians with more than one record, which record you had open; blocking them entirely means sign-in won't work, because the browser has nowhere to keep the session. Your Light-or-Dark choice is also saved on your account, so signing in again puts it back — which is how it follows you to a new phone or a borrowed laptop.

Clearing local storage brings the cookie notice back, unfolds any board lists and record-page sections you had collapsed, puts a test's text size back to normal, puts the calculators back in metric, and lets the dashboard's and each module's setup checklist open or fold by themselves again. Nothing else, and nothing you'd lose — no record, document or setting of yours is kept there.

Clearing this site's stored data (not just its cookies) also deletes anything kept for offline field reports — including reports, charge sheets and hours written offline that have not reached TRACE yet, which exist nowhere else. Send them first: the offline reports page says how many are waiting, and so does signing out.

If the cookies TRACE sets ever change, this page and the date at the top change with them, and the notice reappears so you're told rather than left to notice on your own.