Cookie Usage Policy
What follows is an inventory of every cookie and adjacent browser-storage technology deployed across Paddy Power: the role each one plays, the length of time it occupies space on your device, and the methods available for switching individual ones off or deleting them altogether. Broader policy on the handling of personal information is dealt with separately on the Privacy Policy page — this document is its technical sibling. Editorial context about the site itself is on the About page, while the marquee operator coverage lives on the Paddy Power Casino homepage.
1. What cookies are, in brief
A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to keep on your device. The next time that same site loads, the browser hands the file back, letting the site recognise the visit, remember a setting or count traffic. Cookies cannot run code on your machine, cannot read other files and cannot identify you personally without other information already tied to the cookie. Several things commonly called "cookies" today are technically other browser-storage mechanisms — localStorage, sessionStorage, IndexedDB — that work along the same lines; for plain English, the word "cookie" on this page covers all of them.
2. Different cookie types active on Paddy Power
Three distinct cookie categories exist across Paddy Power. The first time a visitor lands, the consent banner surfaces all three for an active choice; that choice can be revisited and modified at any later point through the dedicated link sitting in the site footer.
| Category | Purpose | Consent required |
|---|---|---|
| Strictly necessary | Make the site work: load the page, remember your cookie-banner choice, route traffic, prevent abuse. | No (legal basis: legitimate interest) |
| Analytics | Anonymous, aggregated traffic measurement: which pages are read, where readers come from, which links are clicked. | Yes |
| Affiliate tracking | Recognise that a click through to an operator came from Paddy Power so the partnership can be credited. | Yes |
Advertising cookies and remarketing pixels are absent from the Paddy Power stack altogether. The pages here carry no on-site display advertising, run through no programmatic ad-tech networks, and never deploy pixels to track readers across unrelated third-party properties. Whatever underwrites the operating costs of the site is broken down on the Affiliate Disclosure page.
3. Individual cookies, third-party providers and lifespans
Catalogued underneath are the specific cookies a visit to Paddy Power can produce. Anything set by a third party — meaning a service we integrate, not Paddy Power code itself — remains ultimately under that party's editorial control, and direct links across to each of their own policy documents are supplied below.
| Name | Set by | Category | Purpose | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|---|---|
paddypower_consent | Paddy Power | Strictly necessary | Stores your cookie-banner choice so the banner does not reappear on every page load. | 12 months |
paddypower_session | Paddy Power | Strictly necessary | Anonymous session identifier used to load assets and rate-limit abusive traffic. | Until browser closes |
_ga, _ga_* | Google Analytics 4 | Analytics | Aggregated traffic statistics: pages per session, traffic sources, average time on page. IP addresses are anonymised before storage. | 14 months |
paddypower_aff | Paddy Power | Affiliate tracking | Records that a click on an outbound operator link originated from Paddy Power so the partnership is credited. | 30 days |
Third-party policies: Google Privacy and Terms covers Google Analytics. Operator partner sites set their own cookies after you click through; those are governed by the operator's own privacy policy, not by Paddy Power.
4. Managing cookies through your browser settings
Every modern browser lets you block cookies, delete existing ones or reject third-party cookies entirely. The official documentation:
You can also visit Paddy Power in your browser's private or incognito mode, which stops cookies being saved across sessions.
5. What occurs when you refuse non-essential cookies
The site stays fully operational. Every editorial page remains accessible, every internal navigation link continues to resolve, and outbound clicks across to operator sites work as before. Three modest practical effects do follow from declining: aggregate traffic statistics will not capture the session; if a partner outbound is clicked while affiliate cookies are switched off, the resulting partnership attribution cannot run — the visitor experiences the operator identically, but the commission flow back to Paddy Power simply never materialises; and clearing browser cookies will cause the consent banner to surface again on the next visit, since the consent choice itself lives inside a cookie. The editorial standards behind every page — including the flagging convention applied to affiliate links — are spelled out on the Editorial Policy page, while the safer-play commitments are documented on the Responsible Gambling page.
6. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control signals
Paddy Power respects the Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal: when your browser sends GPC, all non-essential cookies are blocked automatically and the consent banner is suppressed. The older Do Not Track header lacks an agreed enforcement standard and is not relied upon.
7. Updating this cookie policy
Whenever the underlying cookie stack on Paddy Power shifts, the document you are reading is refreshed and the "Last updated" stamp at the top moves forward to match. Substantive shifts — the introduction of a new category, the addition of a new third-party service — fire off a one-shot reset of the consent banner so that returning visitors are asked again from scratch. Cosmetic edits like reworded sentences or refreshed external links do not interrupt anyone's existing consent.
8. Queries and grievances
Any specific query about an individual cookie running on Paddy Power is best sent in through the Contact page. Where a complaint about a UK site needs to escalate further, the appropriate regulator is the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, which enforces compliance with both the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.