Cookies

Cookie Policy

Our website uses cookies to improve user experience. By using our website, you consent to our cookies in accordance with our Cookie Policy.

What are Cookies?

A cookie is a text file containing a small amount of data which is downloaded to your computer when you visit one of our websites or see one of our adverts elsewhere on the internet. The vast majority of websites use cookies and tracking technologies. Cookies are useful because they help us arrange the content and layout of our websites and recognise those computers that have been to our websites before. They allow us to remember your preference settings and play an important role in helping us to enhance the usability and performance of our websites and your experience using them. Some cookies are also essential to enable you to move around our website and use its features. They also help us to identify which of our articles are the most popular and the types of journey visitors have to our websites.

What are Cookies used for?

Cookies are used by sites or services when they want to know if your computer or mobile device has been a visitor before to a website. These cookies will then be used to help understand and remember your preferences (such as language), help you navigate between pages efficiently and generally improve your browsing experience.

Similarly, cookies are used by web publishers to help understand how their site or service is being used, for example Google analytics use coolies to provide anonymous aggregated data such as how long users in general spent on a website and how many pages was visited by the user and in which order. Cookies can be used for online advertising to make informed guesses on your demographic and ads targeted to you. So for example, you visit a website and search for a particular product such as “headphones” a cookie is dropped and the next website you visit will display headphone adverts.

What type of Cookies do we use?

We use two types of cookies to aid your experience with our website and content as follows:

Session cookie also known as in-memory cookie or transient cookie, exists only in temporary memory while you the user navigate through our website. Web browsers normally delete session cookies with you close your browser. Unlike other cookies, session cookies do not have an expiration date assigned to items which is how browsers know to treat them as session cookies.

Persistent cookie or tracking cookies does not expire when the browser is closed as session cookies do, a persistent cookie expires at a specific date or after a specific length of time. Persistent cookies will transmit to the server every time the users visit the website that it belongs to, or every time the user views a resource belonging to that website from another website such as an advertisement. These cookies are also used to keep users logged onto their accounts on websites which avoids re-entering login credentials at every visit.

How do I change my cookie settings?

If you don’t want us to place cookies on your computer then there are a number of ways you can opt out - setting your browser either to reject all cookies, to only allow “trusted” sites to set them, to accept only those cookies from those websites which you are currently on.

We like the website www.aboutcookies.org which gives you detailed step by step guidance on how to control and delete cookies depending on your browser type. You can then adjust your browser settings to your preferred level of protection.

You can also use the links below to find out how to manage cookies on popular browsers:

To find information relating to other browsers, visit the browser developer's website.