What Cookies Do on a Betting Site
Cookies on the Paripesa platform serve four broad purposes. Session and security functions are absolutely essential to the service; preference, analytics, and marketing functions are optional.
- Keeping you signed in: Your secure session is held in an encrypted cookie, and every page you open afterwards checks it. Cookies and related browser storage preserve your information as you move between pages (for example, ensuring the selections in your bet slip do not vanish when you navigate to another match).
- Holding your preferences: They remember the odds format you chose (decimal or fractional), your preferred language, or whether you have already dismissed a pop-up notice so we do not bother you with it again.
- Supporting fraud and security checks: Cookies make it possible for our system to notice if a login attempt is arriving from an unusual geographic location, or to flag if one single device is suspiciously operating several different accounts simultaneously.
- Measurement and Analytics: They help us see which pages get read, where people abandon the registration process, or whether a payment page is so confusing that half our visitors leave it. This helps us fix the platform.
The Four Categories of Cookies We Use
For this plain-language guide, we group the cookies used on our site into four functional categories. (Our full legal cookie policy uses specific technical terminology and is the master document).
| Category | What It Actually Does | Can You Disable It? |
|---|---|---|
| Strictly Necessary | Session holding, authentication, secure area access, and critical anti-fraud security checks. | No โ Required for core functionality and your financial safety. |
| Preferences | Remembers odds format, language, and dismissed notices. | Yes โ But your settings will reset every time you visit. |
| Analytics | Aggregate measurement of how our pages are used and where errors occur. | Yes |
| Marketing | Advertising tracking and promotional campaign attribution. | Yes |
The crucial distinction is the first row versus the other three. “Strictly necessary” cookies are not a category we decided to be stubborn about; they are the literal mechanism by which a logged-in session exists at all.
What Actually Breaks If You Block Them?
Most corporate cookie pages tell you that you can refuse everything and leave it at that. As the operator, we prefer to tell you what refusing them actually costs your user experience.
- If you block Strictly Necessary cookies: You may be entirely unable to stay signed in, reach protected account areas, or complete financial transactions. Browsers (like Brave or Safari on strict mode) that block all cookies by default will cause this to happen without telling you why the site is “broken.”
- If you block Preference cookies: The site works perfectly to place bets, but it suffers amnesia. Your odds format resets to the default, your language resets, and notices you have already dismissed will pop up every visit.
- If you block Analytics and Marketing cookies: Absolutely nothing breaks. These categories are not needed for core account functions such as placing a bet, viewing a balance, or requesting a withdrawal. We state this plainly because these are the two categories people most often assume are load-bearing.
How to Control Your Cookies
Every modern browser lets you view and delete cookies, block them by specific sites, and clear them automatically on exit. That technical control sits with you and works regardless of what our website offers.
Where our own on-site cookie banner offers category-level choices, you can use it to manage the optional cookies separately. Refusing optional categories does not restrict your account in any way. We would rather you set your preferences deliberately than just blindly click “Accept All” to make the banner disappear.
Security Tip: Clearing your cookies completely logs you out of Paripesa. If you use a shared family computer or a public device, regularly clearing cookies is a massive security feature, not an inconvenience.
Cookies and Your Data Rights in Zambia
Under the Zambian Data Protection Act No. 3 of 2021, personal data includes “online identifiers.” That means any cookie data capable of identifying you is legally considered personal data in the same sense as your name or NRC. Therefore, the statutory rights set out on our official Privacy Policy page fully apply to it.
In practice, you have the legal right to:
- Ask what online identifiers we hold about you.
- Object to specific processing, particularly processing for direct marketing purposes.
- Complain to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner if you believe our data processing breaches the Act.
These rights exist purely by law and do not depend on our cookie controls or on whatever button you clicked when you first arrived on our site.
Note on Erasure: Refusing optional cookies via our banner controls whether those cookies are used going forward. Exercising a data-protection right over information already collected is a separate legal matter. Official objection and data erasure go through the formal request route detailed on our Privacy Policy page.