How we use cookies
A cookie is a small file which asks permission to be placed on your computer’s hard drive. Once you agree, the file is added and the cookie helps analyse web traffic or lets you know when you visit a particular site. Cookies 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.
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. We only use this information for statistical analysis purposes and then the data is removed from the system.
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. You can choose to accept or decline cookies. You can change the settings in your browser if you would like to deny all cookies.
The cookies in use on this website are:
Google Analytics: Three cookies for google analytics tracking, the first is a persistant cookie (remains in your browser when you leave the website), the second two are session cookies (are deleted a short time after you leave the website):
- _ga : Used to distinguish users. Stores the ClientID, a unique and randomly generated string, so that the user can be associated on future visits, the date of first visit and version of GA cookie. Expires in 2 years.
- _gat : Throttles the number of requests a user does to Google Analytics’s servers. Expires in 1 minute.
- _gt : Stores the ClientID. Expires in 24 hours.
Any personally identifiable information such as your IP address, is masked (anonymized) before it is sent to google.
Paypal: When you use our payment pages you will be redirected to paypal where they may store cookies in your browser in order to complete the payment process. We are not responsible for these cookies and they are controlled by Paypal. Please see Paypal’s privacy policy here.
Social Media: This website uses social media sharing buttons, when you click a share button to share one of this website’s pages to your social media account, you are then interacting with a third party website and covered by their Privacy Policy. Various social media widgets are used by this website, as a result, this website makes requests to the social media provider’s servers for you to be able to share our webpages using your social media accounts. These requests make your IP address visible to the social media provider, who may use it in accordance with their data privacy policy, they may also set cookies that we are not responsible for:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/en/privacy#update
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/update
- Google Plus: https://policies.google.com/privacy
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/legal/privacy-policy
- Pinterest: https://policy.pinterest.com/en/privacy-policy
As a rule, cookies will make your browsing experience better. However, you may prefer to disable cookies on this site and on others. The most effective way to do this is to disable cookies in your browser. We suggest consulting the Information Commisioners Office’s guide for online cookies, which explains how to control cookies in many different browsers.
