Cookies Policy

‘Essential’ cookies are automatically placed on your computer or device when you access our website or take certain actions on our website. ‘Non-essential’ cookies and other technologies are only placed on your computer or device if you have consented to us doing so. For information on the difference between essential and non-essential cookies, see the section below entitled About cookies.

For information on how you consent and how you can withdraw your consent to us placing non-essential cookies and other technologies on your computer or device, see the section below entitled How to accept or reject cookies.

Contents

• About cookies
• List of cookies used
• Essential cookies
• Non-essential cookies
• Web beacons
• How to accept or reject cookies

About Cookies

What are cookies?

Cookies are small data files sent by a website’s server to a web browser, processor memory or hard drive and stored there. They can be used for a range of different purposes, such as customising a website for a particular user, helping a user navigate a website, improving that user’s website experience, and storing that user’s preferences and login information.

Essential and non-essential cookies

Cookies can be classified as either ‘essential’ or ‘non-essential’.

Essential cookies: These are cookies that are either:

• used solely to carry out or facilitate the transmission of communications over a network; or
• strictly necessary to provide an online service (e.g. our website or a service on our website) which you have requested.

Non-essential cookies: These are any cookies that do not fall within the definition of essential cookies, such as cookies used to analyse your behaviour on a website (‘analytical’ cookies) or cookies used to display advertisements to you (‘advertising’ cookies).

Session and persistent cookies

Cookies can be classified as either ‘session’ or ‘persistent’, depending on how long they last after they are placed on your browser.

Session cookies: Session cookies last for as long as you keep your browser open. They expire when you close your browser.

Persistent cookies: Persistent cookies expire at a fixed point in time or if you manually delete them from your browser, whichever occurs first.

First and third party cookies

Cookies can be classified as ‘first party’ or ‘third party’.

First party cookies: These are cookies placed on your device by our website domain.

Third party cookies: These are cookies placed on your device by third party website domains.

If you require further information about cookies in general, please visit www.allaboutcookies.org.

List of cookies used

We use the following cookies on our website:

Name of Cookie	Essential or Non-essential?	Type of Cookie	First or Third Party?	Session or Persistent?	Expiry Time	Purpose
_ga	Non-essential	Analytical	First party	Persistent	2 years	Used to distinguish users.
_gid	Non-essential	Analytical	First party	Persistent	24 hours	Used to distinguish users.
_gat	Non-essential	Analytical	First party	Persistent	1 minute	Used to throttle request rate.
PHPSESSID	Essential	Server	First party	Session	End of browser session	Used to keep track of sessions.

Essential cookies

These are cookies which are strictly necessary for our website to be able to operate or to provide you with a service on our website which you have requested. We use the following essential cookies on our website:

• first party session cookies to remember your input when you fill in an online form over several pages on our website.
• first party session cookies to identify and authenticate you when you log into our website so you do not need to repeatedly enter your login information.
• first party persistent security cookies used for detecting repeated failed login attempts.
• first party persistent security cookies used to prevent abuse of the login system on our website.
• third party session multimedia player cookies to play audio and video content on our website.
• third party persistent cookies to recognise whether you have accepted the use of cookies on our website.

Legal basis for processing: We process information about you contained in or obtained from essential cookies in our legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) of the General Data Protection Regulation).

Legitimate interests: ensuring our site functions properly and providing you with online services you have requested.

How to opt out of essential cookies

Most browsers allow you to block all cookies, including essential cookies. Please note, however, that if you block all cookies, parts of our website and its functionality may not work or display properly.

You can delete existing cookies from your browser by clearing your browsing data and ensuring that the option to delete cookies is selected.

For more detailed information on how to accept and reject cookies, including guidance for specific browsers, please see the section below entitled How to accept or reject cookies.

Non-essential cookies

We use the following types of non-essential cookies on our website:

• Functional cookies
• Analytical (or performance) cookies
• Targeting (or advertising) cookies

Functional cookies

These are cookies that are designed for purposes such as enhancing a website’s functionality. These are either not strictly essential for the website or functionality which you have requested to work, or are cookies which serve non-essential purposes in addition to their essential purpose. We use the following functional cookies on our website:

• first party persistent cookies to provide protection against Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks (CSRF), for administrators and other users who are 'logged in' to our website. These cookies expire after 12 months.

How to opt in or out from functional cookies
See the section below entitled How to accept or reject cookies.

Processing information about you contained in or obtained from functional cookies
Legal basis for processing: we process information about you contained in or obtained from functional cookies in our legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) of the General Data Protection Regulation). We will only process such personal information if you have consented to us placing cookies on your computer or device.


Legitimate interests: improving your website experience and providing or enhancing the website functionality you have requested.

For further information on how we use the information gathered from our use of functional cookies, please see the section entitled Our use of automated decision making and profiling in our privacy policy.

Analytical (or performance) cookies

Analytical (or performance) cookies track and gather data about what a user does on a website. These cookies are not essential for our website or its functionality to work. We use the following analytical cookies on our website:

• We use Google Analytics cookies on our website. Google Analytics cookies help us understand how you engage and interact with our website, including how you came to our website, which pages you visited, for how long and what you clicked on, and your location (based on your IP address).
• The Google Analytics cookies are persistent cookies. These cookies expire after either 24 hours or 2 years, dependent on the cookie.
• The information we collect using analytical cookies is collected on an anonymised basis.

More information
Google Analytics cookies are classified as first party cookies as they are set by our website domain, although Google collects and processes information from our use of Google Analytics. To find out more about how Google handles information collected from Google Analytics, see Google Analytics’ privacy policy, which is available here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245.

For information on how Google uses data from cookies it uses, please visit www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/

How to opt in or out from analytical cookies
See the section below entitled How to accept or reject cookies

To opt out of Google Analytics tracking across all websites in general, you can do so here: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Processing information about you contained in or obtained from analytical cookies
Legal basis for processing: we process information about you contained in or obtained from analytical cookies in our legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) of the General Data Protection Regulation).

Legitimate interests: analysing how individuals use our website to help us improve our website and business. For further information on how we use the information gathered from our use of analytical cookies, including profiling, please see the section entitled Our use of automated decision making and profiling in our privacy policy.

Third party cookies

Third parties use cookies to analyse your use of our website and/or to display advertisements (including third party advertisements) to you. Third party cookies used in relation to our website include:

• N/A

More information
For information about the cookies Google uses in relation to the above, see the ‘Advertising’ section on the Types of cookies used by Google page in Google’s cookies policy, which is available here: https://www.google.com/policies/technologies/types/.

For information about how Google uses data from cookies for its own purposes, please visit the following link www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/.

How to opt in or out from third party cookies
See the section below entitled How to accept or reject cookies

Processing information about you contained in or obtained from third party cookies
Legal basis for processing: we process information about you contained in or obtained from third party cookies in our legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) of the General Data Protection Regulation).

Legitimate interests: the purposes for which we use the third party cookies as described above. For further information on how we use the information gathered from our use of third party cookies, please see the section entitled Our use of automated decision making and profiling in our privacy policy.

Legal basis for processing: consent (Article 6(1)(a) of the General Data Protection Regulation).
Consent: you give your consent to the purposes for which we process your information using third party cookies by [insert method by which a user consents to your use of third party cookies e.g. by clicking I accept the purposes for which you use advertising cookies in our cookie tool (describe the mechanism by which the user consents to the purposes for which you use advertising cookies on your website).

Other technologies

Web beacons

We and any marketing companies we use also embed web beacons in our marketing emails. Web beacons are small GIF image files which enable us to track your receipt of our marketing emails, how often you view our adverts or website pages, your location, IP address and browser information. Web beacons are activated whenever you open a marketing email or access a page on our website which contains a web beacon. Web beacons transmit data when you view them but are not capable of accessing any other information on your computer. Web beacons are not stored on your hard drive unless you download a GIF image containing them.

Some (but not all) browsers enable you to restrict the use of web beacons by either preventing them from sending information back to their source (for example, when you choose browser settings that block cookies and trackers), or by not accessing the images containing them (for example, if you select a ‘do not display images (in emails)’ setting in your email server).

How to opt in or out
See the section below entitled How to accept or reject cookies

Legal basis for processing: We process the information we gather from the use of web beacons in our legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) of the General Data Protection Regulation).

Legitimate interest: Analysing the effectiveness of our email marketing campaigns. For further information on how we use the information gathered from our use of web beacons, including automated decision making please see the section entitled Our use of automated decision making and profiling in our privacy policy.

How to accept or reject cookies

There are a number of different ways in which you can accept or reject some or all cookies. Some of the main methods of doing so are described below:

You are welcome to block the use of some or all of the cookies we use on our website. However, please be aware that doing so may impair our website and its functionality or may even render some or all of it unusable.

You should also be aware that clearing all cookies from your browser will also delete any cookies that are storing your preferences, for example, whether you have accepted cookies on a website or any cookies that are blocking other cookies.

You can find more detailed information about cookies and adjusting your browser settings by visiting www.allaboutcookies.org.

Accepting or rejecting cookies

Browser settings
You can accept or reject some or all cookies (for example, blocking all third party cookies) by adjusting your browser settings. If you do not know how to do this, the links below set out information about how to change your browser settings for some of the most commonly used web browsers:

• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Apple Safari

Some browsers, such as Chrome and Firefox, allow you to change your settings to browse in ‘incognito’ mode, limiting the amount of data placed on your machine and automatically deleting any persistent cookies placed on your device when you finish your browsing session. There are also many third party applications which you can add to your browser to block or manage cookies.

Existing cookies
To clear cookies that have previously been placed on your browser, you should select the option to clear your browsing history and ensure that the option to delete or clear cookies is included when you do so.

Google Adsettings
You can manage and opt out of personalisation of advertisements by Google by visiting Google’s ad settings page here https://adssettings.google.com/ and by:

• unticking the button entitled ‘Also use Google Account activity and information to personalize ads on these websites and apps and store that data in your Google Account’; and
• switching the ‘Ads Personalisation’ setting off (i.e. by ensuring the switch at the top of the page is set to the left/grey and not the right/blue).

Alternatively, you can install a free browser plugin here: https://support.google.com/ads/answer/7395996.

Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on
You can opt out of Google Analytics tracking by installing the browser add-on which is available here: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Web beacons

You can opt out of our use of web beacons in our marketing emails by choosing to receive our emails in plain-text format instead of HTML format. Our plain text emails do not contain web beacons.

Disconnect for Facebook
You can install a browser add-on tool called ‘Disconnect Facebook pixel and FB tracking’. This will stop Facebook tracking you on third party websites. You can install the tool here:

• For Chrome
• For Firefox

European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance Tool
You can opt out of Facebook and other companies that participate in the Digital Advertising Alliance in Europe from showing you interest based ads by visiting http://www.youronlinechoices.com, selecting your country, clicking ‘Your Ad Choices’, then locating Facebook (and any other companies you want to block) and selecting the ‘Off’ option.