Cookie Policy
Last updated: 24 August 2026
This document is in draft and has not completed legal review.
It describes how the Auctionomy platform actually works today and is published so that prospective customers and bidders can read it, but it has not been settled by a qualified lawyer in any market and does not yet bind anyone. Points still awaiting a lawyer are marked in the text and listed at the foot of the page. If you are negotiating an agreement with us, the signed order form governs — not this page.
Two categories, one of which you control. This page names both, lists every provider a grant actually reaches, and links to the control that changes your choice.
1. What this covers
Cookies are small files a site stores on your device. This policy covers cookies and every equivalent technology — local storage, session storage and similar — because the law treats them the same way and so should we.
It applies to auctionomy.com and to the Auctionomy operator dashboard. An auction house's own website runs on the same mechanism, but that auction house decides what it enables there and answers for it; their site's banner is asked in their name and links to their policy.
2. The two categories
There are exactly two: Strictly necessary, which you cannot switch off, and Analytics, which is off until you turn it on. There is deliberately no advertising or retargeting category, because no advertising or retargeting technology exists anywhere in the product. If one is ever added, this list has to change first.
- Strictly necessary (always on): Keeps you signed in, protects forms against cross-site request forgery, routes you to the right auction house, and remembers this cookie choice. The site cannot work without these, so they cannot be turned off.
- Analytics: Measures which pages and buttons are used, so the site can be improved. Loads a third-party analytics script. Turning this off means the script is never loaded at all — not merely silenced.
Strictly necessary storage is used without asking because the ePrivacy Directive (2002/58/EC as amended by 2009/136/EC, Article 5(3)) exempts storage that is strictly necessary to provide a service you explicitly asked for. Keeping you signed in, protecting a form against cross-site request forgery, routing you to the right auction house, and remembering that you refused analytics all fall inside that exemption. Nothing else does.
Refusing analytics means the third-party script is never loaded at all, not that it is loaded and silenced. Your refusal is itself recorded in a strictly necessary cookie, which is why declining does not make the banner reappear on every page.
3. Which providers a grant reaches
The table below is generated from a registry in our source code. Every entry is bound by an automated test to a fact about the codebase, so a provider cannot be added or removed without this page changing with it. The consent column tells you which entries your analytics choice controls.
| Provider | What it does for us | Consent |
|---|---|---|
| Convex | Primary application database and realtime backend. Stores every record in convex/schema.ts. | Strictly necessary |
| Vercel | Application hosting and edge network for all three apps. Processes request metadata including IP address. | Strictly necessary |
| Stripe | Tenant subscription billing and bidder invoice payment processing. | Strictly necessary |
| Cloudflare R2 | Object storage for lot images, consignment media, and rendered invoice PDFs. | Strictly necessary |
| Agora | Live video and audio streaming during live auctions. | Strictly necessary |
| Vercel AI Gateway | Routes the two AI features on tenant websites to model providers: lot-title suggestions on the consignment form, and the CMS content helper (rewrite, expand, summarise, translate). Forwards the submitted text to the selected provider and returns the generated text. | Strictly necessary |
| Resend | Transactional email delivery — registration, outbid alerts, invoices, approvals. | Strictly necessary |
| Better Stack | Error and performance monitoring for the marketing site, dashboard, and tenant websites. | Strictly necessary |
| Google (Sign in with Google) | Optional federated sign-in for auction-house staff on the dashboard. | Strictly necessary |
| Google Maps Platform (Places) | Address autocomplete in profile, customer, consignment, and tenant settings forms. | Strictly necessary |
| PostHog | Product analytics and session replay for the marketing site and the operator dashboard — page views, CTA clicks, and a replay of the operator's own session. Replaced OpenPanel in #1140. Deliberately NOT loaded on tenant auction-house websites, so no bidder is measured by it. | Requires your analytics consent |
| Tinybird | Per-tenant web analytics on auction-house websites, via the self-hosted flock.js tracker. | Requires your analytics consent |
| OpenAI | Drafts a lot title from a consignment enquiry. The market, description, condition and provenance the person typed are sent in the prompt (apps/website/src/utils/ai.ts). | Strictly necessary |
Pending legal review: confirm the cookie-by-cookie inventory — name, purpose, duration and first or third party — for each provider above, and whether the German TDDDG section 25 consent rules and any other member-state divergence require a different presentation in the EU module.
4. Changing your mind
Withdrawing consent has to be as easy as giving it, so the control is permanent rather than a banner you get one shot at. It sits in the footer of every page, next to the legal links:
Your browser also has its own cookie controls, usually under Settings or Preferences. Blocking strictly necessary storage there will break sign-in and bidding — that is not a threat, it is what those cookies do.
A recorded choice expires and you will be asked again, and you will also be asked again if the categories change materially.
5. Questions
Questions about what we store go to privacy@auctionomy.com. The Privacy Policy covers what happens to the information once collected, and your rights over it.
Points still awaiting legal review
One point in this document needs a qualified lawyer, or a fact only we can supply, before the document is settled. It is listed here rather than left for a reader to find.
- 3. Which providers a grant reaches — confirm the cookie-by-cookie inventory — name, purpose, duration and first or third party — for each provider above, and whether the German TDDDG section 25 consent rules and any other member-state divergence require a different presentation in the EU module.