Cookies & Tracking Technologies Policy, VISU Network

This Cookies Policy explains how VISU Network ("VISU", "we", "us") uses cookies and similar tracking technologies on the visu.to website and on every VisuLink page hosted under the visu.to domain. It is published as a companion document to the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Service, those documents define how we process personal data; this document explains the specific storage and tracking mechanisms we use to do it.

We last updated this page on May 18, 2026. If we make material changes, for example, adding a new advertising partner or a new analytics provider, we will revise the date at the top and surface the change in the cookie consent banner the next time you visit.

What cookies and similar technologies are

A cookie is a small piece of text that a website asks your browser to store on your device. Your browser sends it back with every subsequent request so the website can remember things across pages and sessions. Beyond cookies, modern web apps also use localStorage, sessionStorage, IndexedDB, and device-level advertising identifiers (on mobile) for the same kinds of purposes. Whenever this policy says "cookies" it means all of these mechanisms collectively.

What we use cookies for

We group the cookies and similar storage we use into four categories. The first is required for the site to work at all; the other three are optional and controlled by your consent.

1. Strictly necessary cookies

These keep the site usable. They store your authentication session so you stay logged in across pages, hold your language preference so visu.to/br stays Portuguese on refresh, remember whether you have already dismissed the cookie banner, and protect form submissions against cross-site request forgery (CSRF). Without them, basic features such as logging in, switching language, or claiming a reward would fail. We cannot let you opt out of these, they are exempt from consent under the EU ePrivacy Directive and CCPA's "essential" carveout, but they never carry advertising or analytics data.

Examples: visu_session, visu_auth_token, visu_lang, visu_cookie_consent, the CSRF token issued by our Django backend.

2. Functional cookies

These improve the experience but are not strictly required. They remember which dashboard tab you were last on, your preferred dark/light theme, whether you have closed an onboarding modal, your recent search terms on the Explore page, and similar preferences. If you disable them you will still be able to use the site, but it will forget those small choices and feel a bit less personal between sessions.

3. Analytics cookies

We use Google Analytics 4 (cookies prefixed _ga, _ga_*) and Google Tag Manager (no cookies of its own, it only injects other tags after you consent) to understand how the site is used in aggregate. We look at which pages get traffic, which VisuLink categories convert best, how many scans turn into account creation, and where users drop off in the signup flow. We do not use analytics to identify individual visitors. Analytics is the data source we rely on most heavily for product decisions, and disabling it has no effect on what the product does for you, it just hides your usage from our aggregate dashboards.

4. Advertising cookies

VISU operates its own ad network, and we also run campaigns through third-party advertising partners to reach new creators. Advertising cookies, including Google AdSense (__gads, __gpi, IDE, NID), Google Ads conversion pixels, and mediation partners, are used to measure how many people who saw an ad ended up signing up, scanning a VISU QR, or creating a VisuLink. On the supply side, VisuLink pages may serve ads from the VISU ad network or AdSense; those ads can drop cookies to limit how many times you see the same creative, to measure engagement, and (where you have consented) to personalize the ad you see.

If you do not consent to advertising cookies, ads on visu.to are served in contextual mode, based on the page you are viewing, not on a profile of you across the web, and conversion measurement falls back to aggregate, non-identifying signals.

Third parties that may set cookies on visu.to

The third parties below are the only entities that can set cookies through the visu.to domain or be loaded by our scripts. Each one has its own privacy and cookies documentation and is bound by a data-processing agreement with VISU:

• Google LLC, Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, AdSense, Google Ads, and the Google Sign-In SDK loaded only when you tap the "Continue with Google" button.
• Apple Inc., the Apple Sign-In JS loaded only when you tap "Continue with Apple".
• Stripe, Inc., payment and subscription pages embed Stripe Elements, which requires cookies for fraud prevention (Radar).
• AWS / Amazon CloudFront, load-balancer cookies that may be set by our edge layer to keep your traffic on the same server for the duration of a session.
• Sentry (sentry.io), error monitoring; sets no third-party cookies but may store a session ID in localStorage to correlate a crash with the URL you were on.
• AYET-Studios, an ad mediation partner, listed in our ads.txt. Loaded only inside the VisuLink scan flow when an interstitial slot is allocated to that network.

We do not load social-media trackers (Meta Pixel, TikTok Pixel, etc.) on visu.to. If that changes, we will list them here before activation and surface the change in the consent banner.

How long cookies last

Cookies fall into two lifespans. Session cookies are deleted as soon as you close your browser tab; we use them for authentication and CSRF. Persistent cookies stay until they expire or you delete them; we use them for language preference (1 year), consent state (6 months), analytics (_ga is 2 years by default), and advertising measurement (typically 13 months for Google products in the EEA, longer elsewhere). Local storage entries persist until you clear browser data; we use it mostly for UI state such as which onboarding step you last completed.

How you control cookies

You have several layers of control:

1. The VISU cookie banner. The first time you visit visu.to from a new device or after clearing storage, we ask you to accept or reject the optional cookie categories. You can change your decision at any time, the banner re-opens from the Privacy & cookies link in the footer of every public page and inside the in-app settings.
2. The Help Center. The VISU Help Center has a step-by-step article on how to view, export, or delete the data we hold about you, including cookie-derived analytics.
3. Your browser. Every modern browser lets you block all cookies, block third-party cookies only, or wipe cookies for a specific site. Some features of visu.to will break if you block strictly necessary cookies (you will not be able to stay logged in), but blocking advertising and analytics cookies is fully supported.
4. Mobile OS advertising controls. On Android and iOS, you can reset or limit your device advertising identifier in system settings. The VISU mobile app respects that signal, when you opt out at the OS level, we stop using the advertising ID for ad personalization and only use it for fraud prevention.
5. Browser-level "Do Not Track" / "Global Privacy Control". When your browser sends a GPC signal, we treat it as an opt-out of advertising cookies for the duration of your session and persist that choice if your browser keeps the signal on.

Children

VISU is not directed at children under 13 (or under 16 where applicable under EU law). We do not knowingly use cookies to track minors. If you believe a minor created an account or that we are processing cookies belonging to a minor, please write to privacy@visu.network and we will delete the data.

Contact

If you have questions about this policy that the Help Center does not answer, write to privacy@visu.network. For general questions about the product, use the channels listed on the Contact page.