What are cookies?

For almost any modern website to work properly, it needs to collect certain basic information on its users. To do this, a site will create files known as cookies – which are small text files – on its users’ computers. These cookies are designed to allow the website to recognise its users on subsequent visits, or to authorise other designated websites to recognise these users for a particular purpose.

Cookies do a lot of different jobs which make your experience of the Internet much smoother and more interactive. For instance, they are used to remember your preferences on sites you visit often, to remember your user ID and the contents of your shopping baskets, and to help you navigate between pages more efficiently. They also help ensure that the advertisements that you see online are more relevant to you and your interests. Some data collected is designed to detect browsing patterns and approximate geographical location to improve user experience.

Some websites may also contain images called ‘web beacons’ (also known as ‘clear gifs’). Web beacons only collect limited information, including a cookie number, a timestamp, and a record of the page on which they are placed. Websites may also carry web beacons placed by third party advertisers. These beacons do not carry any personally identifiable information and are only used to track the effectiveness of a particular campaign (for example by counting the number of visitors).

Information collected by cookies is now classed as personal data.

How do we use cookies?

We collect a number of cookies from our users for various reasons, not least to track our own performance – but also to let us serve you content tailored to your own specifications, hopefully improving your overall experience of the website. Amongst other things, the cookies we use allow users to register to make comments, allow us to calculate how many visitors we have and how long they stay on our site.

We do our utmost to respect users’ privacy. We use cookies to monitor and improve our services, but they do also allow us to sell advertising campaigns that are tailored to your interests and reading behaviour on our website, which helps keeps our content free to our readers. We sometimes include links on our site to goods and services offered by third parties and we may be paid some commission if you subsequently decide to make a purchase. Cookies may be used to track your visits to third party sites to help ensure that we are paid the correct amounts. Please note that these commercial arrangements do not influence our editorial content in any way.

We believe that your experience of the site would be adversely affected if you opted out of the cookies we use.

What types of cookie are there and which ones do we use?

There are two types of cookie:

• Persistent cookies remain on a user’s device for a set period of time specified in the cookie. They are activated each time that the user visits the website that created that particular cookie.
• Session cookies are temporary. They allow website operators to link the actions of a user during a browser session. A browser session starts when a user opens the browser window and finishes when they close the browser window. Once you close the browser, all session cookies are deleted.

Cookies also have, broadly speaking, four different functions and can be categorised as follows: ‘strictly necessary’ cookies, ‘performance’ cookies, ‘functionality’ cookies and ‘targeting’ or ‘advertising’ cookies.

Strictly necessary cookies are essential to navigate around a website and use its features. Without them, you wouldn’t be able to use basic services like registration or shopping baskets. These cookies do not gather information about you that could be used for marketing or remembering where you've been on the internet.

Here are some examples of how we use performance cookies:

• Gathering data about visits to the website, including numbers of visitors and visits, length of time spent on the site, pages clicked on or where visitors have come from.
• For comparison with other websites using data collected by industry-accepted measurement and research companies. 

Information supplied by performance cookies helps us to understand how you use the website; for example, whether or not you have visited before, what you looked at or clicked on and how you found us. We can then use this data to help improve our services.  We generally use independent analytics companies to perform these services for us and when this is the case, these cookies may be set by a third party company (third party cookies).

The two main ways we use advertising and targeting cookies are set out below:

• Interest-based advertising (or online behavioural advertising) is where cookies are placed on your device by our third party service providers which remember your web browsing activity and group together your interests in order to provide you with targeted advertisements which are more relevant to you.These cookies will usually be placed on your device by third-party advertising networks and we have listed the main third party networks we work with below.

Without these cookies, online advertisements you encounter will be less relevant to you and your interests. 

 

How do I control my cookies?

You should be aware that any preferences will be lost if you delete all cookies and many websites will not work properly or you will lose some functionality. We do not recommend turning cookies off when using our website for these reasons.

Most browsers accept cookies automatically, but you can alter the settings of your browser to erase cookies or prevent automatic acceptance if you prefer. Generally you have the option to see what cookies you’ve got and delete them individually, block third party cookies or cookies from particular sites, accept all cookies, to be notified when a cookie is issued or reject all cookies. Visit the ‘options’ or ‘preferences’ menu on your browser to change settings, and check the following links for more browser-specific information.

Cookie settings in Internet Explorer

Cookie settings in Firefox

Cookie settings in Chrome

Cookie settings in Safari

 

Managing performance cookies

It is possible to opt out of having your anonymised browsing activity within websites recorded by performance cookies.

We use the following companies and you can opt out of their cookies by clicking on the relevant links. Please note that this will take you to the relevant third party's website and generate a ‘no thanks' cookie, which will stop any further cookies being set by those third parties.

Don't forget that by not allowing performance cookies, this stops us from being able to learn what people like or don't like about our website so that we can make it better.