Cookie Policy

A cookie is a small text file that a website asks your browser to keep. Each time your browser then requests a page from that same website, it sends the file back. That is how a site can tell that two pages you opened belong to the same visit, or remember a choice you made a moment earlier.

Cookies differ mainly in how long they last. A session cookie is held only while you are browsing and disappears when you close your browser. A persistent cookie carries an expiry date and stays on your device until that date passes, or until you delete it yourself.

Browsers offer other ways of keeping data as well, the most common being local storage. In everyday speech it is often called a cookie too, but it behaves differently, and it is described separately below. This policy covers both, because both leave something behind on your device and you are entitled to know what.

The STBC website is a public information site. There is no personal account to sign into here, nothing to buy, no advertising space and no audience measurement. It therefore asks very little of your browser.

At most three things are kept, and each exists only to show you the site the way you asked for it. The first is a cookie named NEXT_LOCALE, set by the component that serves the site in French and in English; it records the language the pages are being served in. The second is an entry named selected-theme, held in your browser's local storage, which records whether you chose the light appearance, the dark one, or the one your device is set to. The third is an entry named third-party-consent, which records the answer you gave about the content served by other companies, described further down. None of them contains your name, an identifier, or anything that could be used to recognise you elsewhere.

None of the three is required for the site to work. The language is written into the address of every page as well, so everything remains usable if you refuse them all. What you lose is the memory of your preferences — including the memory that you were asked about embedded content, which means the question comes back.

This policy is published with reference to Loi organique n° 2004-63 du 27 juillet 2004 on the protection of personal data, which is the framework that applies in Tunisia.

The table below is the complete inventory of what this website places in your browser. For each item it gives the exact name your browser will display, whether it is a cookie or a local storage entry, what the item is for, and how long it stays. There are three rows and no others. There is nothing else to declare.

All three are functional. None measures anything, and none is shared:

Your appearance preference — light, dark, or whatever your device is set to — is kept under the name selected-theme in your browser's local storage. Its value is never anything other than one of those three choices.

Your answer about embedded content is kept the same way, under the name third-party-consent, and its value is never anything other than granted or denied. Everything said below about local storage applies to it as well.

The distinction is worth knowing, because the two mechanisms behave differently. A cookie is attached automatically to the requests your browser makes to this site, so it reaches the server. Local storage is not: it stays inside the browser, only pages from this same site can read it, and it is never transmitted anywhere. We do not know which appearance you chose, and we have no way of finding out.

Local storage also has no expiry date. The value remains until you clear the browsing data for this site.

It is read before the page is drawn, so the site opens directly in the appearance you selected instead of showing the other one first. If storage is unavailable — in private browsing, or because you blocked it — the site simply follows your device setting, and nothing else changes.

Two things on this site are served by another company rather than by us. Two pages embed a Google map: the contact page, and the posters section of the JNBC congress page, where the map appears only once you open that tab. And a tutorial may be a video hosted on YouTube or Vimeo, in which case its page embeds that company's player — tutorials whose video was uploaded to STBC's own service are served by us and involve nobody else. When one of these loads, your browser connects to that company directly. It receives the request, including your IP address, and may set cookies of its own in your browser. Those cookies are theirs, governed by their own privacy and cookie policies, which STBC neither controls nor can read.

None of them loads until you allow it. Until then the frame is not placed on the page at all — not hidden, not waiting — so no request reaches the company and no cookie of theirs can be set; a panel appears in its place with a button to load it. Once you do allow it, your browser tells them which site the content is on, but not which page of it: every frame is set to pass on as little as it can, and YouTube videos are embedded through its no-cookie address. Your answer covers all of them together, and you can change it in either direction at any time, in the section on managing what is stored below.

Everything else that leads off this site is an ordinary link rather than embedded content: our YouTube channel, documents held on Google Drive, the members' application, and the sharing buttons on news articles. Tutorial thumbnails are images served by STBC, never fetched from the video company, so a listing page requests nothing from them — only opening a tutorial whose video they host, and then only once you have allowed it, does.

This site carries no analytics. There is no audience measurement product, no tag manager, no advertising or profiling cookie, and no tracking pixel. Nothing here records which pages you read, follows you from one website to another, or builds a profile of your interests.

No third-party script is loaded at all. The typefaces are packaged with the site itself rather than fetched from an outside font service, so ordinary browsing generates no request to any other company. The embedded maps and video players described above are the only exception, they load only if you allow them, and only on the pages that show them. A few connections exist that are not part of browsing, all of them to the society's own service at its own address rather than through this site: sending the contact form, subscribing to the newsletter, and opening either of the two pages our emails link to. That last one is worth spelling out — the page that confirms a subscription contacts the service by itself, as soon as it opens, because confirming is the only thing it is for. What happens to it there is set out in our privacy policy.

There is no device fingerprinting, no web beacon, no service worker and no offline database. There is no sign-in on this website either, so there is no session cookie and no authentication cookie.

This site offers one setting of its own, and it is the one that decides whether anything leaves your browser: whether content served by another company — the maps, and any tutorial video they host — may load. The control below shows the answer currently recorded for you and changes it, in either direction, as often as you like. Withdrawing is one click, in the same place, and takes effect immediately.

Everything else is handled by your browser, which is better placed to do it. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all let you inspect the cookies and storage a site has placed, delete them, block them for one site or for every site, and clear everything automatically when you close the window. The controls sit under Privacy or Site settings; the exact route changes between versions, so your browser's own help pages are the reliable guide.

Private browsing has the same effect for a while: whatever a site stored is discarded once the last window is closed.

The consequence here is small, and we would rather state it plainly than promise otherwise. The site keeps working. Every page stays reachable, readable and printable, and no content is hidden behind a preference. What you lose is memory. The language you selected is no longer carried from one page to the next, so the site falls back to the address you open or to your browser's own language settings; the appearance returns to your device setting each time you arrive; and the embedded maps and videos, having no recorded answer, ask again rather than assume one.

This page describes the site as it stands today. If a later version keeps something else in your browser, or embeds content from another company, this policy and the table above will be updated to say so.

That update does not rely on anyone remembering to make it. The theme entry is pinned to the line of code that writes it, and every build sweeps this site's own source for anything else it might place in your browser.

The date of the most recent revision is shown at the top of this page. We do not keep an archive of earlier versions, so if this document matters to your work, keep a copy of the version you relied on.

If anything on this page is unclear, or if you want to know more about what the site keeps in your browser, please write to us. Our details are listed at the end of this section, and we reply in French or in English.

This policy covers storage in your browser only. What happens to the information you send us through the contact form is set out in our privacy policy, which is linked from the foot of every page.

In Tunisia, personal data is protected by Loi organique n° 2004-63 du 27 juillet 2004, and the Instance Nationale de Protection des Données à Caractère Personnel (INPDP) supervises how it is applied; a complaint may be addressed to it. Visitors reading the site from the European Union may hold further rights under the law of their own country, and are welcome to write to us about them.