Cookie policy
What we store on your device, why, and how you can control it.
Last updated: October 2026
apply.edu.pl is a free, English-only catalogue of university study programmes in Poland. We do not use tracking cookies and we set no first-party cookies of our own. This page explains the small amount of on-device storage and the privacy-first measurement we use, grouped by purpose.
1. Strictly necessary & functional
These keep the site working and remember your own choices. They live in
your browser's localStorage (not cookies), are never sent to us
and never identify you personally:
- Consent preference (
cookie-consent) — remembers your accept/decline choice, so the banner doesn't reappear. Accepting turns on our own usage measurement in section 2 and the third‑party AI chat widget in section 4. Both start only after you accept: until you choose, and if you decline, both stay off. - Saved programmes & comparison (
shortlist, comparison list) — your shortlist and side-by-side picks. - Preferences — e.g. your chosen display currency and any document-builder drafts you start.
Our security/CDN provider, Cloudflare, may set its own
strictly-necessary cookies (for example __cf_bm) to protect the
site from abuse. These are required for security and are not used by us for
tracking.
2. Analytics — first-party, cookieless, only after you accept
To see which pages are useful and improve the catalogue, we measure usage
on our own server. This starts only after you choose Accept
on the cookie banner (or accepted earlier on this device); until then, and
if you choose Decline, nothing is measured and nothing is stored for it. It
uses no cookies. Once you accept, a random visit id is kept in your
browser's sessionStorage under the key ae_sid
until you close the tab, so the pages of one visit can be counted together;
it is never shared between tabs or with other sites.
Each measurement event sends that visit id and: the page path; the host name of the site that referred you (never its full address); for clicks, the link type, the university and the destination host; how long the page was viewed and how far it was scrolled; and your country as supplied by our CDN's request header. We collect no name, email or account, no IP address is written to our analytics log, and the logs rotate automatically. Figures are only ever viewed in aggregate, and we do not track you across other websites.
After you accept, the same script also loads Cloudflare Web
Analytics, our CDN's privacy-first web analytics: a third-party
script from cloudflareinsights.com that sets no cookies and keeps no data
on your device. It is not loaded until you accept, nor if you decline.
We honour your browser's “Do Not Track” setting: with it on,
nothing is measured even after Accept. Removing the stored
cookie-consent value (see Managing
cookies) stops measurement and brings the banner back.
3. Referral attribution (UTM)
When you click a link from apply.edu.pl to a university's website or its
application system, we append referral parameters to the destination URL
(for example utm_source=apply.edu.pl,
utm_medium=referral). These travel to the university's own
analytics, not ours — they let the university see that the visit came from
apply.edu.pl. This sets no cookies; it is simply a tag on
the outgoing link.
4. Third-party services
The “Ask an advisor” chat is provided by a third party (dmchamp.com). Its script loads only after you choose Accept on the cookie banner (or previously accepted on this device) — choosing Decline keeps it off entirely. Once it loads it may set its own cookies or storage to make the widget work. You do not need to interact with it for it to load; only the conversation itself begins when you open the chat.
Maps on university pages, city pages and the map page come from OpenStreetMap, a third party. Your browser requests an embedded map from www.openstreetmap.org, or map tiles from tile.openstreetmap.org, so OpenStreetMap receives your IP address and the usual technical details of the request, including the address of the page or site that shows the map. Unlike the chat, this does not wait for the cookie banner: it happens as soon as the page loads (for an embedded map, when it is about to scroll into view), whether or not you have accepted, and without any click. The “Activate map” button starts nothing; it only lets you scroll and zoom a map that has already loaded. Whatever OpenStreetMap stores or sets is covered by its own privacy policy.
Managing cookies
You can change or withdraw your choice at any time with the button below (also in the footer of every page): it forgets your choice, reloads the page and shows the consent banner again.
More information
For how we handle data more broadly, see our privacy notice. Questions about this policy can be sent to hello@apply.edu.pl.