1. What is a Cookie?
A Cookie, sometimes known as a HTTP Cookie or Web/Internet/Browser Cookie, is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a visitor’s web browser while that visitor is browsing that website. Whether the cookie remains in an individual’s web browser after their browsing session or when the bowser is restarted depends on the browser’s configuration settings. For more information on what controls you have over which cookies are stored and how long they are retained for, see the privacy controls documentation relating to your browser.
Every time an individual loads a website page that uses cookies, the individual’s browser send the cookie(s) back to the server to notify the website of your previous activity. Cookies are typically made to remember stateful information like items in your shopping cart or details of previous log ins, interaction within the website e.g. clicking particular buttons or recording which pages were visited previously (as far back as months or years).
2. Cookies and how they benefit you
Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.
Our cookies help us:
- Make our website work as you’d expect;
- Save you having to login every time you visit the site;
- Remember your settings during and between visits;
- Improve the speed/security of the site;
- Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook;
- Personalise our site to you to help you get what you need faster;
- Continuously improve our website for you;
- Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do).
We do not use cookies to:
- Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission);
- Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission);
- Pass data to advertising networks;
- Pass personally identifiable data to third parties;
- Pay sales commissions.
3. Granting us permission to use cookies
If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you grant us permission to use cookies. Should you wish to remove, or not accept cookies from our site, you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.
4. More about our cookies
Website Functional Cookies
We use cookies to make our website work including:
- Determining if you are logged in or not;
- Remembering your search settings;
- Remembering if you have accepted our terms and conditions;
- Allowing you to add comments to our site;
- Tailoring content to your needs;
- Remembering your preferences such as colours, text size and layout;
- Remembering if we have already asked you certain questions (e.g. you declined to use our app or take our survey)
There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.
Third Party Cookies
Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded video. Our site includes the following which use cookies:
- YouTube – Privacy Policy powers the videos on our site
- Vimeo – Privacy Policy powers the videos on our site
- Google – Privacy Policy
Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.
5. Turning Cookies Off
You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of ours and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.
It may be that your concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive.