Our Website uses cookies to distinguish from other users of our Website. They allow us to analyse trends and administer the Website to help us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our Website and to improve it at the same time.
You must give your express consent in order to access and browse our Website. If you do not accept the provisions of this policy, you must exit our Website immediately.
What cookies are and what are used for
A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer or your mobile device, if you agree, and that uniquely identify your browser or device. Our Website sends information to your browser which then creates a text file. Every time the user goes back to our Website, the browser retrieves and sends this file to our Website’s server. A cookie, enables the website to remember users that have already visited it. Without a cookie, every time you open a new web page, the server where that page is stored will treat you like a completely new visitor. Cookies can be used to help understand how the website is being used, help you navigate between pages efficiently, help remember your preferences, and generally improve your browsing experience. Cookies allow us to remember your custom preferences such as your language preference and allow you to complete tasks without having to re-enter your information when browsing in order to make browsing on our Website easier.
What types of cookies we use
- Strictly Necessary Cookies: These types of cookies are essential for the operation of our Website, as they include cookies that enable you to move around the Website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of our Website and making use of its check-out functionally.
- Performance/Analytical Cookies: These cookies collect information about how you have used the Website. We use these cookies to track aggregate Website usage and experiment with new features and changes on the Website (i.e. to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our Website when they are using it). The information collected is used to improve how the Website works (i.e. by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily).
- Functionality Cookies: These cookies allow us to recognise when you return to our Website, whether you made an edit to an article on the Website while logged out, the state or history of Website tools you’ve used. These cookies also allow us to tailor the Website to provide enhanced features and content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences (i.e. your choice of language or region). The information these cookies collect may be anonymous, and they are not used to track your browsing activity on other sites or services.
- Targeting Cookies: These cookies record your visit to the Website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. These cookies cannot determine who you are though, as the data collected is never linked to your profile. We will use this information to make the Website and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose.
- Session Cookies: These cookies, also known as in-memory cookies, transient cookies or non-persistent cookies, exist only in temporary memory while the user navigates our Website. They contain encrypted information to allow our system to uniquely identify you while you are logged in. Session cookies exist only during an online session. They disappear from your computer when you close your browser software. These allow us to process your requests and help us make sure you are who you say you are after you’ve logged in.
- Third party cookies: Third party cookies are cookies that another party places on your device through our Website. These cookies allow our Website to interact with different websites which may provide useful information. Please note that third parties (including advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies.
How to control and delete cookies
You can block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies), you may not be able to access all or parts of our Website. Moreover, some parts of our Website may not function properly if you choose not to accept cookies.
Except for essential cookies, all cookies (apart from third party cookies over which we have no control) will expire after 30 days.
You can also control the use of cookies at the individual browser level. If you reject cookies, you may still use our Website, but your ability to use some features or areas of our Website may be limited.
Visit the “options” or “preferences” menu on your browser to change settings in relation to cookies.
Many browsers allow you to browse privately whereby cookies are automatically erased after you visit a site. The following is a list of the most common browsers and the way in which you can activate private browsing:
- Internet Explorer 8 and later versions: In Private
• Safari 2 and later versions: Private Navigation/Browsing
• Firefox 3.5 and later versions: Private Navigation/Browsing
• Google Chrome 10 and later versions: Incognito
You can find out more information about cookies on various sites, such as www.allaboutcookies.org.
What is an IP Address?
When you first started your internet session (i.e. your computer connected to the internet), your computer was automatically assigned a unique number (normally in the region of 9 or 10 decimal numbers), known as an IP Address. This is your computer’s unique address on the internet. Without such an IP Address, websites would not be able to deliver their content to you as they would not be able to find your computer on the internet. Since each time you disconnect and reconnect to the internet a new IP Address is automatically assigned to your computer, IP Addresses are not inherently capable of identifying you as an individual (at least, by themselves).
An IP Address does, however, contain information regarding the location of your computer on the internet (your country) and the name of your ISP.
How Do We Collect Your IP Address
Each time you visit a page on our Website, your computer sends out a message to our Website asking for the content. This message sent by your computer also encloses your IP Address as a form of “return address” so that the Website may find your computer in order to send it the requested content. Our web-server automatically logs all these messages.
What Do We Do With Your IP Address?
When we log your IP Address, the data collected is grouped up with the other logged IP Addresses in order to provide us with the statistics on the geographic location of visitors to our Website, how long they stay on our Website, which are the most viewed pages and for other statistical reasons.
We gather your IP address automatically and store it in log files. These files also contain information relating to your browser type, ISP, operating system, date/time stamp, clickstream data and the files viewed on our Website. Collecting this type of information allows us to generate aggregate information for the purposes of our Website, including in terms of overall user trends and activities online (such as the number of unique visitors, pages access most frequently or the search terms entered). It also allows us to administer our Website, diagnose any potential server problems, analyze visitor trends and statistics, and generally held us to provide you with a better internet experience. IP Addresses are not stored for longer than necessary for the above stated purposes.
We will not use your IP address to identify you, the individual, in any way.