Cookie Policy
Last updated 3 September 2026 · Version cookies-2026-09
Portava is a trading name of MemberAssistant Ltd, a company registered in Northern Ireland (company number NI733574) with its registered office at 102 Northland Road, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, BT48 0AS.
This policy explains what cookies we use, why, and how you control them. It sits alongside our privacy policy, which covers personal data more broadly.
What a cookie is
A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to keep, so that the site can recognise your browser next time. Some are essential — without them you could not stay signed in. Others exist to measure how a site is used, or to support advertising. The law treats those two groups very differently, and so does this policy.
Similar technologies — local storage, session storage and tracking pixels — do the same job by different means, and everything in this policy applies to them too.
Two different sites, two different answers
Portava has two distinct web surfaces, and they behave very differently. This is the most important thing on the page.
Our marketing website — portava.ai. The public site, where you are probably reading this. It uses essential cookies, analytics cookies, and advertising cookies.
The Portava application — app.portava.ai and your organisation’s portal. Where members sign in and their data lives. It uses essential cookies only. No analytics cookies, no advertising cookies, no third-party trackers of any kind, and no member is followed across other websites.
That difference is deliberate rather than accidental. The application holds membership organisations’ records about their members, and that is not an appropriate place for advertising technology. We would rather lose the analytics than put a tracker next to somebody’s membership record.
The three categories
Strictly necessary. Required for the site or the application to work — keeping you signed in, keeping your session secure, and remembering your cookie choices. These cannot be switched off, because without them the thing you asked for cannot happen. The law does not require consent for these.
Analytics. How many people visit, which pages they read, roughly where they came from. We use this to decide what is worth building and writing. It tells us about patterns, not about you personally.
Advertising and retargeting. Set by advertising platforms so we can measure whether our advertising works, and show Portava to people who have looked at it before.
Analytics and advertising cookies are set only if you agree to them. When you first arrive at portava.ai you are asked. Until you choose, nothing in those two categories is set. If you decline, the site works exactly as it did before.
Cookies on the Portava application
These are the complete set. All are strictly necessary, all are first-party, and all are marked httpOnly — meaning JavaScript on the page cannot read them, so a script injected into a page cannot steal your session.
Session cookie — Keeps you signed in to your portal
How long it lasts: 7 days, refreshed every 24 hours of use
portava_view_as_member — Marks an active support session, where a Portava operator is viewing a portal to investigate a problem
How long it lasts: 1 hour
portava_platform_recent — Remembers which organisations a Portava operator visited recently, so the platform console can offer them back. Set only inside our own admin console, never in a member’s portal
How long it lasts: 30 days
We also use your browser’s session storage to record that you have viewed a piece of content, so the same view is not counted twice. That is not a cookie, it never leaves your browser, and it is cleared when you close the tab.
Cookies on the marketing website
If you would like this list in another format, or have a question about a specific cookie, write to .
Changing your mind
On the marketing website, use the cookie settings link in the footer. You can change your choices at any time, and withdrawing consent is as straightforward as giving it. Withdrawing it does not make anything done beforehand unlawful, but it stops anything further.
In your browser, you can block or delete cookies for any site. Every major browser has this under its privacy or site-settings menu, and browsers also offer a private or incognito window that discards cookies when you close it.
One consequence worth knowing: if you block all cookies including strictly necessary ones, you will not be able to sign in to Portava. The sign-in process works by giving your browser a session cookie, so a browser that refuses it cannot stay signed in.
Cookies we do not use
To be explicit, because a short list is easier to hold onto than a long one:
We do not use cookies to build a profile of you as an individual for sale or exchange.
We do not sell cookie data.
We do not place advertising or analytics cookies anywhere in the Portava application.
We do not use cookies to make automated decisions about people.
Changes to this policy
We will update this page when what we do changes. Every version carries a date and a version marker at the top, so you can tell whether what you read before still applies.
Contact us
Write to , or to MemberAssistant Ltd, 102 Northland Road, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, BT48 0AS.
You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK regulator for cookies and privacy, at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. Our ICO registration reference is ZC236980.