Cookie & Tracking Policy

What a cookie actually is

A cookie is a small piece of text that a website asks your browser to hold on your device and to send back the next time you load a page from the same site. It is not a program, it cannot open your other files, and by itself it cannot see anything you have not already typed into or sent through that browser. Think of it as a claim ticket rather than a spy: the website hands your browser a slip when you first arrive, and the next time your browser visits the same address it hands the slip back, so the site can recognise that this request is connected to the one before it, rather than treating every page load as a stranger walking in for the first time. That is the whole mechanism. What varies from one website to the next is not how a cookie works, but what it is used to remember.

"Similar technologies" is the wider phrase this page is named after, and it is worth naming the other kinds even where this website does not use them, so the policy is complete rather than convenient. Local storage and session storage work like a cookie in what they remember but sit inside the browser itself rather than travelling with every request the browser sends, which usually means more can be stored and it is not automatically sent back to the server. A tracking pixel, sometimes called a web beacon, is a tiny invisible image loaded from a page purely so that whoever served it learns the page was opened. None of these technologies exist to be sinister on their own account. An online shop uses one to remember what is sitting in your basket between pages. A site with a login uses one to remember that you have already signed in, so it does not ask you to prove it again on every click you make. This website has no basket and no login screen, which already rules out most of the ordinary reasons a site reaches for one.

The clearest working example on this website is what happens if you fill in the enquiry form and something needs correcting before it can be sent: a phone number typed with a letter caught in it, a required field left empty. The page reloads with the mistake pointed out, and the details you had already typed are still sitting in the form rather than wiped clean, so you are not made to start over because of one typo. A small cookie is what carries that draft across the reload. It holds what you typed and what needs fixing, for up to half an hour, and only for the enquiry page. That single behaviour, a page remembering you well enough to be useful for the next few minutes and no further, is what a cookie is actually doing on this website, described in one sentence rather than in the abstract.

Why this website uses cookies at all

A website, left to itself, forgets you the instant a page has finished loading. Every request your browser sends is treated as a fresh one unless something travels along with it saying otherwise, and that is a deliberate feature of how the web is built rather than an oversight: a page you have never visited before genuinely should not know anything about you, and a page can only build memory of you where something has actually been asked to carry that memory forward from one request to the next. A cookie, or one of the similar technologies described above, is the ordinary way that happens, on this website and on almost every other one.

We keep the reasons narrow on purpose, because a reason has to exist before a cookie does, not the other way round. This website has no user accounts of any kind: there is nothing to log into, no password of yours stored in our systems, and no state of being 'signed in' for a cookie to preserve, because that state does not exist here at all. What we do need a cookie for is smaller and more specific than that: keeping the enquiry form working the way the previous section describes, and the ordinary security housekeeping every website on the internet needs, being able to tell a genuine visit apart from a replayed or forged one. Without at least that much, a public form is an open door rather than a way to reach us.

What we do not use a cookie, or anything like one, for is building up a picture of you across separate visits, following you onto another website once you have left this one, or working out what to advertise to you elsewhere on the internet. Those are legitimate reasons other websites reach for cookies, and they are simply not reasons this one has needed so far. If that ever genuinely changes, an analytics tool to understand which route pages are actually being read is the likeliest example, this page is where that change is named and explained before the cookie behind it is ever set, on the terms the rest of this page sets out.

The cookies this website currently sets

A cookie policy conventionally sorts what a site finds into four categories, and it is worth naming all four here even though, on this website today, three of them are empty. Strictly necessary cookies keep the site working and secure and cannot sensibly be switched off without breaking the thing they support. Functional or preference cookies remember a choice you made, a language, a font size, a dismissed message, so you are not asked to make it again on the next page. Analytics or performance cookies measure how a site is actually used, which pages are read, how long a visit lasts, usually reported in aggregate rather than tied to one named visitor. Advertising or targeting cookies build up a profile of your browsing so that an advertisement elsewhere can be aimed at you specifically.

That is the entire list. This cookie cannot be read by any script running in your browser: it is set with the `HttpOnly` flag, which means it exists purely for the conversation between your browser and our server and is invisible to any script running on the page itself, ours or anybody else's. It is marked `SameSite=Strict`, so your browser will not send it along with a request that started on another website. It is limited to the enquiry page and nowhere else on this site, and it is never sent to, or shared with, any third party. It does not identify who you are; it identifies a browser tab mid-way through filling in a form, for as long as that form takes to finish.

We do not sell or share your browsing data with advertisers, and this website carries no advertising cookie, no advertising pixel and no third-party tracking script of any kind.

We do not set a functional or preference cookie beyond the one above, an analytics or performance cookie, or an advertising or targeting cookie of any kind.

The one exception worth stating honestly, rather than folding into the table above because it is not our own cookie, is the map on our contact page: it loads a frame directly from Google Maps to show our office and the roads around it. Because that frame is served from Google's own servers rather than ours, Google may set its own cookies once that particular frame loads, according to Google's own policies, entirely outside what this website can see or control. Nothing we add to that page reads, writes or relies on whatever Google does inside its own frame, the frame is only loaded once you actually scroll down to it rather than the moment the page opens, and it is set to pass Google less information about how you arrived than a browser sends by default. If you would rather not load it at all, our office address is printed in plain text immediately beside it, precisely so that finding us on this website never requires it.

Your choices, through your own browser

This website does not yet ask you to choose anything about cookies, for the reason the next section explains in full: there is nothing optional here to choose between. What you already have, on any modern browser, is a full set of controls over cookies generally, and they work on this website exactly as they work on any other. Every major browser, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and their mobile equivalents, lets you see what cookies a site has set, delete them individually or all at once, block a specific site from setting any at all, or block cookies from every site by default and allow them only where you choose to. The exact menu differs from browser to browser and version to version, so the reliable way to find it is to search your browser's own name together with the word 'cookies' in its settings or help, rather than to rely on a set of steps printed here that may already be out of date by the time you read them.

A private or incognito browsing window is a related but different control: it does not stop a site from setting a cookie during that session, it simply throws every cookie set during it away the moment you close the window, so nothing persists to your next ordinary visit. This is a reasonable way to fill in our enquiry form once without leaving anything behind afterwards, though it also means the draft-saving behaviour described earlier in this page will not survive if you close and reopen the window part-way through.

If you block cookies from this website entirely, most of it continues to work exactly as it does for anyone else. You can browse every service and route page, use the fare calculator, read our published policies and look up a phone number, all without a single cookie, because none of that content is gated behind an account or a saved preference of any kind. The one part that genuinely needs the cookie is the specific recovery behaviour on the enquiry form described in the first section of this page: with cookies blocked, a form that needs correcting will simply ask you to fill it in again rather than remembering your earlier answers for you. Submitting the enquiry itself still works with cookies blocked; you would just be doing so without that one convenience if a mistake needs fixing along the way.

What happens if you decline, or block, this cookie

The honest answer is close to nothing. Every cookie this website sets today is optional in the sense that matters to you: nothing on the site checks whether it exists before deciding what to show you.

Concretely: with the enquiry-draft cookie blocked, filling in the form and submitting it correctly the first time works exactly as it would otherwise. The only difference appears if the form is sent back to you with something to fix, in which case you retype rather than have your earlier answers restored. No page on this site refuses to load, no fare calculation is withheld, and no content anywhere is hidden behind a cookie choice, because this site was built, from the outset, without an account system for a cookie to gate anything behind.

This is also why this website does not currently show you a banner asking you to accept or reject cookies before you can use it. A consent banner exists to get permission for something optional before it is set. We have nothing optional to ask your permission for yet, and a banner asking you to consent to nothing would be decoration rather than a genuine choice. The moment that changes, so does this page, and the next section states in full what changes alongside it.

How consent will be recorded, once anything needs your consent

There is no consent mechanism on this website today. Before this website ever sets a cookie beyond the one strictly necessary one described above, a consent banner or an equivalent mechanism will be built and shown to you first, and it will offer 'Accept' and 'Reject' with equal visual prominence: the same size, the same weight, and neither one styled to be easier to find or press than the other. No box will arrive pre-ticked in your favour, and no path to using the site will require accepting anything you have not been asked about plainly.

Where this website ever adds a cookie beyond what is strictly necessary to operate it, your consent will be sought first, through a mechanism offering Accept and Reject with equal prominence, before that cookie is set.

Once that mechanism exists, what it records for each visitor is a timestamp of when the choice was made, the choice itself, and the version of the notice you were actually shown at the time, so that if this page is revised later we can always tell which version of it you agreed to rather than a version you never saw. That record exists to answer one question honestly if it is ever asked, whether a particular consent was genuinely given and on what terms, and it is not used for anything beyond that. Where you are able to change your mind later, withdrawing consent will be made no harder than giving it was, through the same mechanism or a clearly signposted equivalent reachable from every page.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control

'Do Not Track' is a signal a browser can be set to send with every request, asking a website not to track the visit; 'Global Privacy Control' is a newer, similar signal built into some browsers and browser extensions, intended to carry more legal weight behind the same basic request. Neither signal currently changes anything about how this website behaves, for a straightforward reason: this website does not track visits in the first place, in the sense either signal is asking about, so there is nothing for either signal to switch off today.

The commitment that matters is about what happens if that ever changes. If this website ever adds any cookie or technology that falls outside the strictly necessary category described earlier in this page, an analytics tool being the likeliest example, a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal received from your browser will be honoured for that addition: where either signal is present, the optional cookie or technology it is asking about will not be set for that visit, in the same way that declining it through a consent banner would achieve.

Children

This website is not directed at children, and our Terms of Use at /terms already require whoever submits an enquiry or makes a booking to be eighteen years of age or older, for reasons that are about legal capacity to enter into a contract with us rather than about who actually travels; a chauffeur-driven car we run every day carries children and students who are not the person who booked it. Nothing on this point changes because of cookies specifically, but it is worth restating here in cookie terms: this website does not run any behavioural tracking of a child's use of it, does not build a profile of a young visitor across visits, and the one cookie this site sets, described earlier in this page, does not distinguish a child's visit from an adult's because it does not identify a visitor as a person at all. It exists purely to hold a form's own draft for half an hour.

If you believe a child has used this website in a way that concerns you, or that any information reached us through it that should not have, write to us using the contact details at the foot of this page and we will look into it directly rather than ask you to work through a general complaints process for something this specific.

Questions, and how this page changes

Questions about this page, or about a cookie you have found on this website that you do not understand, can be sent to info@om-travels.in. This page is operated by Om Taxi Service, a proprietorship, trading as Om Travels, at Grand Trunk Road, Panipat, Haryana, the same entity named throughout our other published policies.

We will revise this page whenever what this website actually does with cookies changes, whether that is adding the analytics tool discussed earlier, building the consent mechanism described above, or simply narrowing what is written here further. Every version we have published is kept at /legal/changelog, so you can always see exactly what moved, and when, rather than take our word that nothing has changed since you last read it. The effective date printed at the top of this page tells you which version you are reading right now.

This page sits alongside, and does not repeat, our wider Privacy Policy at /privacy-policy, which covers what personal data we collect through the enquiry form itself, why, how long we keep it, and the rights you have over it under Indian data protection law. Where this page is about the mechanism, the cookie itself, that policy is about the information a cookie or an enquiry form actually carries. Read the two together if you want the complete picture rather than half of it.