This cookie policy lists the cookies this website sets, what each one actually does, how long it lives and how to turn off the ones that are not essential. It is a list rather than an essay, because a cookie policy that describes cookies in general without naming the ones on the site in front of you is not telling you anything useful.
On this page
- What a cookie is, briefly
- The four categories, and which need consent
- The strictly necessary cookies, named
- The optional cookies, and what they buy you
- How to change your mind, in three ways
- Do Not Track, global privacy control and what we honour
- Third party content and embedded media
- The legal basis, in Canadian terms
- Changes to this cookie policy
- Common questions
What a cookie is, briefly
A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to keep. On your next request the browser sends it back, which is how a site remembers that the thing in your cart is yours and not somebody else’s.
Cookies cannot execute code, read your files, or see anything you do on other sites unless those sites deliberately share an identifier. Most of the fear around them comes from the advertising industry’s use of the third category described below, not from the technology itself.
Two other storage mechanisms behave similarly and this cookie policy treats them the same way: local storage, which persists until cleared, and session storage, which dies when you close the tab. Where we use either, it is listed.
The related document is our privacy policy, which covers personal information generally. This cookie policy covers only what is stored in your browser by this site.
The four categories, and which need consent
Every cookie on this site falls into one of four groups. Only the first is set without asking you.
| Category | Set without consent? | What it is for | Can you refuse it? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strictly necessary | Yes | Cart, checkout, login, security | Not without breaking the site |
| Preference | No, opt in | Remembering your province and units | Yes |
| Analytics | No, opt in | Counting page views in aggregate | Yes |
| Advertising | Not used at all | Nothing, we do not run them | Not applicable |
The last row is the one worth pausing on. We do not run advertising or cross site tracking cookies. There is no advertising pixel on this site, no remarketing tag, and no data broker script. If you have ever bought a snow blower and then been followed around the internet by snow blower advertisements for six weeks, that did not come from us.
Strictly necessary cookies are exempt from consent under Canadian guidance because the service you asked for cannot be delivered without them. You cannot have a shopping cart that remembers its contents and also refuse the cookie that identifies the cart. Everything else on this site is genuinely optional and genuinely off until you say otherwise.
The strictly necessary cookies, named
These are set by WooCommerce and WordPress, the software this shop runs on, and by our security layer. They contain no marketing identifier.
| Cookie | Purpose | Lifetime | Who sets it |
|---|---|---|---|
| woocommerce_cart_hash | Detects when the cart contents change | Session | First party |
| woocommerce_items_in_cart | Tells the page whether the cart is empty | Session | First party |
| wp_woocommerce_session_* | Links your browser to your cart on the server | 2 days | First party |
| wordpress_logged_in_* | Keeps a logged in customer signed in | Session or 14 days | First party |
| wp-settings-* | Remembers admin screen preferences | 1 year | First party |
| sbc_consent | Records your choices from this cookie policy | 6 months | First party |
The last one is worth explaining because it is slightly circular. We have to store a cookie in order to remember that you declined cookies. Without it, the banner would reappear on every page and your refusal would be forgotten each time. It holds nothing but your preference and a date.
None of these follow you off this site. All are first party, meaning they are set by snowblowerscanada.com and readable only by snowblowerscanada.com.
The optional cookies, and what they buy you
Preference cookies remember small things: the province you chose so tax and freight estimate correctly, whether you prefer inches or centimetres, and the last position of the snow depth finder on our home page. Refusing them costs you nothing except retyping those choices.
Analytics cookies count visits in aggregate. They tell us that four hundred people looked at 28 inch two stage machines this week and that ninety of them went on to read the best snow blowers in Canada. They do not tell us who you are, and we do not join that data to your order record.
Analytics is genuinely useful to you as well as to us. It is how we discovered that most people arriving on a parts page had no idea where the stock number is stamped on the machine, which is why the snow blower repair guide now shows exactly that. But it is not necessary, so it is off until you turn it on.
Where an analytics provider processes data outside Canada, that transfer is covered in the cross border section of our privacy policy. IP addresses are truncated before storage so the record cannot be tied back to a household.
How to change your mind, in three ways
Your consent under this cookie policy is not permanent and reversing it takes seconds.
- The banner. On your first visit you get a real choice with a genuine refuse option, not a design where accepting is one click and refusing is four. Both buttons carry equal weight, which is what the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has repeatedly said consent requires.
- The link in the footer. The cookie settings link reopens the same panel at any time. Changes take effect on the next page load.
- Your browser. Every major browser can block or delete cookies per site. Doing so overrides anything we do, and it is the right approach if you do not want to trust any site’s own controls.
Blocking strictly necessary cookies at the browser level will break the cart and the checkout. That is not a punishment, it is a technical consequence: the server cannot tell one anonymous browser from another without a session identifier. If you want to browse without any cookies at all, everything except buying will work normally.
Do Not Track, global privacy control and what we honour
We honour the Global Privacy Control signal. If your browser or an extension sends it, we treat that as a refusal of all optional cookies and we do not show you the banner asking again.
The older Do Not Track header is effectively dead as a standard, because almost no site ever honoured it and browsers have largely stopped sending it. We treat it the same way as Global Privacy Control anyway, on the basis that a clearly expressed preference deserves respect regardless of whether the industry agreed to a standard around it.
Neither signal affects strictly necessary cookies, because those are not a tracking question. They are how a shopping cart works.
Third party content and embedded media
We keep third party content to almost nothing, deliberately, because every embedded widget is a party you did not choose to share a page view with.
There are no social media share buttons on this site. There is no live chat widget. There is no embedded map. There is no advertising network. Fonts are served from a font provider that sets no cookie, and product images are served from our own domain.
The one unavoidable third party is the payment processor at checkout, which sets its own cookies for fraud prevention when you reach the payment step. That is a security function rather than a marketing one, and the detail is on the payment and security page. It is also the reason a payment page can behave oddly if you block everything.
If we ever add a genuinely useful third party feature, this cookie policy will list it before it goes live rather than after somebody notices.
The legal basis, in Canadian terms
Canada does not have a standalone cookie statute the way the European Union does. The requirement comes from federal privacy law, which says meaningful consent is needed to collect, use or disclose personal information, and from the regulator’s guidance on what meaningful means online.
The practical tests we apply are the ones the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada sets out: the purpose has to be described in language a reasonable person understands, the choice has to be real rather than buried, and refusing has to be as easy as accepting. A banner with a bright accept button and a grey link labelled manage preferences fails all three.
Where the information a cookie handles is not personal information at all, for instance a preference for centimetres over inches, consent is a courtesy rather than a legal requirement. We ask anyway, because sorting cookies into legally required consent and morally optional consent is exactly the kind of hair splitting that erodes trust.
Our obligations under Canadian anti spam law are separate again and are covered in the privacy policy and the terms and conditions. Email consent and cookie consent are different things and we do not treat one as the other.
Changes to this cookie policy
If we add, remove or change what a cookie does, we update the tables above before the change goes live. There is no version history page, because a cookie policy that requires you to diff two versions to find out what changed is not being transparent, it is performing transparency.
If a change materially expands what is collected, we ask for consent again rather than relying on the consent you gave for something narrower. Adding an analytics provider counts. Renaming an existing cookie does not.
Questions about anything on this page go through the contact page. If you think a cookie is being set that is not listed here, please tell us and include the cookie name, because that is a bug and we would want to fix it. Related reading: the privacy policy for personal information generally, the accessibility statement for how these controls work with assistive technology, and the terms and conditions for the agreement that governs your use of the site.
Common questions
Do you use advertising or tracking cookies?
No. There is no advertising pixel, no remarketing tag and no data broker script on this site. If you have been followed around the internet by snow blower ads after visiting, that did not come from us.
Which cookies are set before I consent to anything?
Only strictly necessary ones: the WooCommerce cart cookies, the session cookie that links your browser to your cart on our server, the login cookie if you are signed in, and the cookie that records your cookie choices.
Why do you set a cookie to remember that I refused cookies?
Because without it the banner would reappear on every page and your refusal would be forgotten each time. It contains nothing but your preference and a date, and it lasts six months.
What happens if I block all cookies in my browser?
Browsing works normally. The cart and the checkout will not, because the server cannot tell one anonymous browser from another without a session identifier. That is a technical consequence, not a penalty.
Do you honour Global Privacy Control?
Yes. If your browser or an extension sends the signal we treat it as a refusal of all optional cookies and we do not show the banner. We treat the older Do Not Track header the same way even though the industry abandoned it.
Are there social buttons, chat widgets or embedded maps?
No. We keep third party content to almost nothing because every embedded widget is a party you did not choose to share a page view with. The only unavoidable third party is the payment processor at the checkout step.
Is analytics data linked to my order?
No. Analytics counts visits in aggregate and IP addresses are truncated before storage. We do not join it to your order record and it cannot identify you or your household.
How do I change my mind later?
Use the cookie settings link in the footer, which reopens the same panel at any time. Changes take effect on the next page load. Your browser’s per site controls override anything we do.
The last word on cookie policy
Everything above comes down to three decisions and none of them are about brand. Surface first, because gravel removes whole classes in one move and that is a safety limit rather than a preference. Depth second, measured as the typical single storm rather than the seasonal total, because two cities can share an annual figure and need completely different machines. Driveway length third, because width is a time calculation and those minutes repeat every heavy morning for the life of the machine.
Get those three right and the rest follows on its own. Get them wrong and no amount of engine size rescues the purchase. If any of it is still unclear, the contact page reaches somebody who has taken these machines apart, and our buying guides set out the reasoning behind every recommendation rather than just the recommendation.
This cookie policy in one paragraph
If you read nothing else of this cookie policy, read this. We set four strictly necessary cookies and nothing else without asking. There is no advertising cookie on this site, no remarketing tag and no data broker script. Our cookie policy exists because a cookie policy that describes cookies in general without naming the ones on the page in front of you is not telling you anything, and this cookie policy names every one of them in the tables above.
You can change your mind at any time through the footer link, and this cookie policy is updated before a change goes live rather than after somebody notices.