What are Cookies and how they benefit you
A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that is downloaded on to your computer when you visit a website. Cookies are used by many websites and can do a number of things eg remembering your preferences, recording what you have put in your shopping basket, and counting the number of people looking at a website.
Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can.
Our cookies help us:
Make our website work as you would expect
Improve the speed and security of the site
Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook and Twitter
We do not use cookies to:
Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
Pass data to advertising networks
Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
Pay sales commissions
Granting us permission to use cookies
If the settings in your Internet browser are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.
Website Function Cookies
Our own cookies
We use cookies to make our website work.
Social Website Cookies
So you can easily ‘Like’ or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site.
Visitor Statistics Cookies
We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site is not working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called analytics programs also tell us how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before.
Turning Cookies Off
You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our website and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.
Perhaps your concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive.