In common with most websites, we use cookies to capture certain information about our site’s use:
- We use analytic cookies to understand how our site is being used. This measures the number of visitors and tells us how they navigate the site.
- We offer sharing tools (Facebook,Twitter etc) – If you use these the sharing tools those sites set a variety of cookies.
- We seek to maintain compliance with the ICO regulations in force from 26-May 2012. It is widely accepted that the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC’s) clear and concise guidance on cookie regulations, though not constituting legal advice, provides the best guidance in lieu of any official documentation from ICO which is not yet available.
To that end we categorise cookie use as follows:
- Strictly necessary: to fit this category, the cookie must be “related to a service provided on the website that has been explicitly requested by the user”. Obvious cases include shopping cart cookies and access to protected areas. We also include cookies which remember previously entered text so it is not lost if the page refreshes in this category. This is in line with ICC suggestion.
- Performance based: the ICC guidelines includes analytics, advertising and Pay Per Click cookies in this category – provided they only store anonymous data and cannot therefore be used for behavioural targeting of ads.
- Functionality based: these include cookies that remember user choices so that they have a more personalised experience. This may include detecting if the user has already seen a popup so that it isn’t shown again, submitting comments and remembering colours, text size, etc.
- Targeting/ advertising based: primarily these are the cookies that the ICO regulations were originally aimed at. This is aimed at cookies such as those which serve up targeted ads. The ICC guidance on these cookies, advises website owners to get clear, explicit consent from users if a site employs such technology. We do not use any cookies of this type.
- We do not ask user consent for category one, two & three cookies on our websites in accordance with ICC guidance that no opt-in is required for these types of cookies by the user. We do not use any category four cookies, and would always ask for permission if we did.
If you have further concerns or questions over our cookie usage, then we welcome and encourage you to get in touch.
For general information about cookies and how to disable them, please visit www.allaboutcookies.org.
For information on how to opt out of Google Analytic cookies: Google Analytics Opt-Out Browser Add-On.
We would be grateful if you would also contact us if you have any comments on this site or have spotted any errors or non-functioning parts of the site.