Privacy policy
This describes what actually runs on these pages, service by service, rather than what a policy template would say. Where a third party receives something, it says what and why.
CricketTaken (crickettaken.in) is a cricket reference site. There are no user accounts, no subscriptions, no payment forms, no newsletter and no member area. Nothing on this site asks you for your name, your email address or a password, and there is no database of visitors behind it.
That is not the same as saying nothing about you is processed. Loading any web page involves your browser talking to servers, and those servers see things. What follows is the honest version.
Every third party that runs on these pages
This is the complete list. If a service is not here, it is not on the site.
| Service | What it does here | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Hosts and delivers every page and image | Your IP address, browser and the page requested, as any web host does |
| Google AdSense | Advertising script, loaded on every page | IP address, device and browser information; may set advertising cookies |
| Google Analytics 4 | Counts which pages are read | Approximate location, device, browser, pages viewed; sets cookies |
| Sportmonks CDN | Serves player photographs and country flags | Your IP address and browser, because your browser fetches the image directly |
| Google Fonts (self-hosted) | Typefaces, served from this domain | Nothing. The font files are built into the site, so no request reaches Google |
There is no social media tracking pixel, no advertising network other than Google’s, no session recording, no heatmap tool, no A/B testing service, no chat widget, no comment system and no embedded video player. The link to the site’s X profile in the footer is an ordinary link and loads nothing.
What the host records
The site is served by Cloudflare. Like every web host, it processes the technical details of each request — IP address, user agent, the URL asked for, the time — in order to deliver the page, to cache it, and to absorb attacks and abusive traffic. This happens for every visitor and cannot be switched off without switching off the site.
Cloudflare also sends browsers a network error logging instruction, which asks the browser to report failed connections to Cloudflare’s reporting endpoint. That is a diagnostic channel for connection failures, not a record of what you read.
Cloudflare additionally rewrites email addresses printed on these pages into an obfuscated form and loads a small script to decode them, which is why an email address here is not immediately harvestable by a spam crawler.
Advertising
Google’s advertising script is loaded on every page of this site. That script is what allows advertisements to be shown, and it is also what Google uses to verify the site. Once it has loaded, Google and its partners may use cookies and similar identifiers to select advertisements, to measure them, and to limit how often you see the same one — including on the basis of your previous visits to this and other websites.
Because that script loads, this processing can begin whether or not an advertisement is visible to you on a given page. The site is designed to be funded this way, and describing it otherwise would be misleading.
You can control personalised advertising directly with Google in My Ad Center, and opt out of personalised advertising from participating vendors at aboutads.info. Turning personalisation off does not remove advertising; it makes it less targeted. Google’s own description of what it collects across the sites that use its services is in its partner sites notice.
Analytics
Google Analytics 4 is used to see which pages are read and how readers arrive. It sets cookies and processes approximate location, device type, browser and the pages viewed. IP addresses are handled by Google and are not exposed here in raw form.
The analytics script is deliberately not loaded with the rest of the page. It is fetched on your first interaction with the page, or after sixty seconds, whichever comes first — so a visitor who opens a page, reads nothing and leaves within a minute is generally never counted. This was done for page speed rather than for privacy, but the privacy effect is real and is worth stating.
The data is used only in aggregate, to decide what to write and what to fix. No attempt is made to identify individual visitors, and analytics data is not combined with anything else. You can opt out across every site you visit with Google’s Analytics opt-out browser add-on.
What is stored in your browser
Three things are saved in your browser’s local storage. None of them is sent anywhere, and none is readable by this site’s servers, because this site’s servers only send files:
- Your theme choice — whether you prefer the light or dark version of the site.
- Your Playing XI — the team you build in the team builder, including any photograph you add to a player card. Uploaded photographs never leave your device.
- Your answer in the trade poll — so the page does not ask you again.
Clearing your browser’s site data removes all three. When you share a Playing XI, the team is encoded into the web address itself and is not stored here — but anyone with that link can see the team, so treat a shared link as public.
Cookies, in summary
| Set by | Purpose | How to control it |
|---|---|---|
| Google AdSense | Selecting, capping and measuring advertisements | Google My Ad Center, or block third-party cookies |
| Google Analytics | Counting which pages are read | Google’s opt-out add-on, or block cookies |
| Cloudflare | Security and abuse prevention where challenged | Browser cookie settings |
| This site | Theme and saved Playing XI — local storage, not cookies | Clear site data in your browser |
Blocking cookies entirely does not break anything. Every statistic, article, table, the quiz and the team builder all work without them.
Consent, and what this site does not pretend
This site does not currently show a cookie consent banner. Rather than display one that does not actually control anything — which is worse than none — the position is stated plainly here: if you are in a jurisdiction whose rules require your prior consent before analytics and advertising cookies are set, use your browser’s controls or the Google opt-outs linked above until a consent mechanism that genuinely gates these scripts is in place.
Both scripts on this site are loaded in a way that makes such a gate straightforward to add, and it is intended. This paragraph will be replaced by a description of the mechanism when the mechanism exists, not before.
Children
This is a general-audience sports reference. It is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect information from them.
Your rights
CricketTaken holds no personal data of its own, so there is no account to export and no profile to delete here. For data processed by Google through advertising and analytics, and by Cloudflare through hosting, use the controls linked on this page and those companies’ own privacy tools, which cover access, deletion and objection under the GDPR, the UK GDPR, India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act and the CCPA as each applies to you.
If you want to ask about any of this, the address on the contact page reaches a person.
Changes to this policy
This policy describes the implementation as it stands. If a service is added, removed or changed, this page changes with it — the list above is meant to be complete, and a policy that lags the code is a policy that is wrong.