Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information that are downloaded to your device when you visit a website. Cookies are then sent back to the originating website on each subsequent visit, or to another website that recognises that cookie. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user’s device and to therefore improve the user experience when using that website.
You can find more general information about cookies at www.allaboutcookies.org
Why do we use cookies?
Our site uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best possible experience.
Our cookies help us:
- Make our website work as you’d expect
- Improve the speed/security of the site
- Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
- Continuously improve our website for you
- Make our marketing more efficient
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
Website Function Cookies
Should you wish to remove or not use 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.
We use cookies to make our website work including:
- Determining if you are logged in or not
- Remembering your search settings
- There is no way to prevent these cookies from 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 Google Map. Our site includes the following third party functions which use cookies:
Google
Twitter
Disabling these cookies will likely break the functionality offered by these third parties
Social Website Cookies
If you take the opportunity to share website content on social media, then you may well be sent cookies from the relevant website. The privacy implications on this will vary depending on the social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.
We don’t control the setting of these cookies, so we suggest you check the third-party websites for more information about their cookies and how to manage them.
Visitor Statistics Cookies
We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using, how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so-called “analytics” programs also tell us how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before.
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 a large proportion of the world’s websites (including ours) as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.
