A cookie is a small text file placed by a website on the device you use to browse it (computer, tablet, smartphone), via your browser. It is not an executable program: a cookie can neither transmit a virus nor access the contents of your hard drive. It generally contains an identifier, sometimes accompanied by a few simple pieces of information, and is read again by the site that placed it on your subsequent visits.
Technically, cookies are distinguished by their lifespan — session cookies, deleted when the browser is closed, and persistent cookies, kept until an expiry date or until you delete them — as well as by their origin: cookies placed by the site you are visiting (internal cookies, or "first-party") and those placed by a third-party domain, often for audience measurement or advertising purposes ("third-party" cookies). This distinction is useful for understanding exactly what a site does: it provides the thread running through the following section, which details the cookies actually used on Lendovia.
The cookie is not, however, the only storage technology available in a browser, and it is often confused with two related mechanisms: localStorage and sessionStorage. Unlike a cookie, neither is automatically attached to requests sent to the server on every page visited: both technologies remain confined to your browser and are only read by the code of the page that created them, when it needs them. sessionStorage is cleared as soon as you close the tab or browser; localStorage, on the other hand, persists beyond that, until you clear it yourself or purge site data from your browser settings. It is precisely this second technology, local storage, that Lendovia uses to keep your ongoing simulation — amount borrowed, term, estimated monthly payment — and the progress of your application persistent from one screen to the next, rather than a cookie in the strict sense. The result for you is the same — you pick up your journey without re-entering everything — but the mechanism differs slightly: this information is not sent to our servers on every page visited, it remains stored locally on your device, and only leaves it when you explicitly confirm a step in your journey, for example submitting a financing application.
On this site
When you use the credit simulator or start filling in a financing application, several pieces of information are stored locally in your browser as you enter them: the amount borrowed, the repayment term chosen, the resulting estimated monthly payment, as well as the fields already filled in on the application form — employment situation, declared income, nature of the project being financed — while you are putting together an application. These values are associated with your browser and the device you are using; they are neither sent to nor accessible by our servers until you have explicitly confirmed a step in your journey.
This mechanism meets a very concrete user-experience need. Without it, an accidental page refresh, an inadvertent click on your browser's "back" button, or simply the wish to check another page of the site — for example to re-read the terms of borrower insurance — before finishing your simulation, would instantly erase everything you had already entered. You would then be forced to start your simulation or application over from the beginning, a frustrating experience that these internal functional cookies are precisely designed to avoid.
These values are kept for the duration of your active browsing session, and for a limited period beyond that — in practice, a few days at most — after which they automatically expire if you have not resumed your journey. At no point is this data transmitted to a third-party domain, a business partner, or any service outside Lendovia: it remains local to your browser, on your device, and is only used to reconstruct the screen you were viewing. As these strictly necessary cookies are essential to the operation of the simulation and application process, they cannot be disabled without rendering these features inoperative.
On most large-scale sites, the preference cookies category covers a fairly broad set of settings: the display language chosen by the visitor, the currency in which amounts are shown, a units format, a light or dark visual theme, or the layout chosen for a results grid. These cookies exist to spare the user from having to reconfigure the same preferences on every new visit.
On the Lendovia site, this category is deliberately kept to its simplest expression: it is limited to remembering whether the FAQ questions you consult are expanded or collapsed. In practice, if you expand a question to read its answer and then change page, this cookie prevents it from needlessly closing again on the next load, so you don't lose your place. It has no other function: it does not store language, currency, or visual theme, since the site does not offer several versions of any of these.
It is important to note that this preference cookie is in no way linked to your identity, your credit file, or your personal data: it contains only a technical identifier associated with the display state of an interface component, with no value or use outside this specific context.
Lendovia's commitment
No audience-measurement cookie, advertising pixel, or social-network script is embedded on this site. Your browsing on Lendovia does not feed any third-party advertising database.
On a large number of commercial sites, a significant share of the cookies placed comes not from the site being visited itself, but from third-party tools embedded in its pages: audience-measurement solutions that track visitor behaviour — pages viewed, time spent, browsing paths —, advertising pixels that let you be recognised from one site to another to show you targeted ads based on your interests, or social-network scripts that, as soon as they load, can transmit information about your visit to the platforms concerned, whether or not you have an account on those networks. These mechanisms most often rely on so-called "third-party" cookies, placed by a domain other than the one you are visiting, precisely in order to track you across your browsing on separate sites.
None of this exists on the Lendovia site. No third-party audience-measurement or advertising cookie is placed: no audience-measurement tool — whether a standard analytics solution or a behavioural tracking service — is embedded in its pages. No advertising pixel, from any ad network, is present. No social-network script capable of transmitting browsing data is loaded. This absence is not an optional setting we have turned off: it simply reflects the fact that none of these third-party tools has been integrated into this site's code, at any level.
In concrete terms, this means that no data relating to your browsing on Lendovia is shared with an advertising network, a social network, or any other outside service for commercial targeting or profiling purposes. Your journey on this site — the pages you view, the simulation you carry out — remains strictly local to your browser and to our own servers, within the limits already described above, and feeds no third-party advertising database.
Cookies placed on this site are kept for a maximum period of 13 months, in line with the recommendations of the CNIL, the French data protection authority, on this matter. After this period, they are automatically deleted and are only renewed if you continue browsing the site. For details of the retention periods applicable to the various data processed by Lendovia, see our data retention policy.
This maximum period of 13 months is a ceiling set by the Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) for all cookies and trackers, whatever their purpose. In practice, the strictly necessary cookies and storage data used by Lendovia have a lifespan well below this ceiling, since they only serve to keep an ongoing simulation or application persistent for a few days at most. Whether you let this data expire naturally or choose to delete it manually before its term from your browser settings, the effect is strictly the same from your point of view: on your next visit, your journey starts from scratch, without this affecting in any way an application already submitted and recorded on our servers.
The vast majority of cookies used on this site are strictly necessary for it to function: they cannot be refused without preventing certain essential features, such as resuming an ongoing simulation or application. You nonetheless retain control over your cookies at any time, directly from your browser settings: you can view the cookies placed there, delete them individually or all at once, or configure your browser to refuse new cookies by default. Please note, however, that completely blocking cookies may impair your experience on this site and on most websites.
In practice, these settings are found in different places depending on the browser you use:
In all cases, keep in mind that these settings apply to your browsing as a whole, not just to the Lendovia site: changing them may therefore affect your experience on other sites you visit.
Beyond cookies, the information you provide to Lendovia as part of a simulation or financing application is subject to personal data processing. You have a right of access, rectification, erasure, portability, objection, and restriction with respect to this processing. The details of these rights, and how to exercise them, are set out in our data protection policy.
These rights are exercised directly with Lendovia in accordance with the procedures described in our data protection policy, generally by simple request accompanied by proof of identity, so that we can verify that the request genuinely comes from the person concerned before acting on it. If, after contacting us, you consider that your rights have not been respected or that your request has not received a satisfactory response within the required timeframe, you retain the option of lodging a complaint with the Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL), the competent authority for personal data protection in France, whose contact details and complaint procedure are available on its official website.