What are ‘cookies’?

‘Cookies’ are small text files that are stored by the browser (e.g. Internet Explorer or Safari) on your computer or mobile phone. They allow websites to store such things as user preferences. You can think of cookies as providing a “memory” for the website, enabling it to recognise a user and respond appropriately.

Analytics cookies:

Every time a user visits our website, web analytics software provided by a third party generates an anonymous analytics cookie.

These cookies can tell us whether or not you have visited the site before. Your browser will tell us if you have these cookies, and if you don’t, we generate new ones. This allows us to track how many individual unique users we have, and how often they visit the site.

Unless you are signed in, these cookies cannot be used to identify individuals; they are used for statistical purposes only. If you are logged in, we will also know the details you gave to us for this, such as username and email address.

Third party cookies

Third parties may also set their own anonymous cookies, for the purposes of tracking the success of their application, or customising the application for you. Because of how cookies work, we cannot access these cookies, nor can the third parties access the data in cookies used by us.

For example, when you share a news article using a social media sharing button on our website, the social network that has created the button will record that you have done this.

Cookie Usage

 

The cookies in use to deliver Google Analytics service are described in the table below.

Cookie Title Description
__utma
__utmb
__utmc
__utmv
__utmz		 Google Analytics These cookies are used to store information, such as what time your current visit occurred, whether you have been to the site before, and what site referred you to the web page.These cookies contain no personally identifiable information but they will use your computer’s IP address to know from where in the world you are accessing the Internet.Google stores the information collected by these cookies on servers in the United States. Google may transfer this information to third-parties where required to do so by law, or where such third-parties process the information on Google’s behalf.

Opt-out

In order to provide website visitors with more choice on how data is collected by Google Analytics, Google has developed the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. The add-on communicates with the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js) to stop data being sent to Google Analytics. The Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on does not affect usage of the website in any other way. A link to further information on the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on is provided below for your convenience.

http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=None

For more information on the usage of cookies by Google Analytics please see the Google website. A link to the privacy advice for this product is provided below for your convenience.

http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/privacy.html

Disabling Cookies

If you would like to restrict the use of cookies you can control this in your Internet browser. Links to advice on how to do this for the most popular Internet browsers are provided below for convenience and will be available for the Internet browser of your choice either online or via the software help (normally available via key F1).

Useful links

If you would like to find out more about cookies and their use on the Internet, you may find the following links useful:

Microsoft Cookies guide
All About Cookies

The IAB has provided the following website to give information specifically about privacy issues around Internet advertising:
youronlinechoices.co.uk/uk

For further legal information about privacy issues, you may find these links useful:

Data Protection Act 1998
The Information Commissioner’s Office