About Cookies
A cookie is a small file which is placed on your computer’s hard drive. The cookie helps analyse web traffic and allow web applications to respond to you as an individual. The web application can tailor its operations to your needs, likes and dislikes by gathering and remembering information about your preferences.
How we use cookies
Overall, cookies help us provide you with a better website, by enabling us to monitor which pages you find useful and which you do not. A cookie in no way gives us access to your computer or any information about you, other than the data you choose to share with us. All data is entirely anonymous.
Google Analytics
We use traffic log cookies to identify which pages are being used. This helps us analyse data about web page traffic and improve our website in order to tailor it to customer needs.
Google Analytics is a service that allows us to anonymously track the use of our website by those who visit it. All the data is aggregated and anonymised meaning you cannot be identified personally.
- __utma, which contains a unique ID to record visits from the same user and expires after two years
- __utmb, to record the start of a session and expires after 30 minutes
- __utmc, a session cookie which only lasts while you view the site
- __utmz, to record where a visitor came from previously and expires after six months.
AddThis
These cookies are used to track usage of the Addthis.com service. Addthis allows the user to share a webpage with many social sites.
AddThis is the world’s largest content sharing platform. It gives end users a simple and easy way to share content across the social web, and provides publishers with increased web traffic and in-depth analytics. AddThis is owned and operated by Clearspring Technologies.
- __atuvc, updates the share count and expires after two No data from that cookie is sent back to AddThis and removing it when disabling cookies would cause unexpected behaviour for users.
Other
- PHPSESSIONID, this ID is used by the website to identify you during your session. A lot of the time it isn’t used at all, but if you decide to do something complex during your visit that isn’t simply clicking a link to move from one page to another (such as filling out a form), the website uses this ID to identify you throughout the process to make sure it runs smoothly. The cookie only lasts while you view the site.
How to delete and block our cookies
You can choose to accept or decline cookies. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. This may prevent you from taking full advantage of the website. If you would like detailed instructions as to how to do this we recommend you take a look at the guides at AboutCookies.org
