Date: 29/07/2020
Version 1.1
Our website uses small files (known as cookies) to see how you use our site. We put them on your computer when you visit our site, and use them to recognise you and store information in between visits.
With cookies we can give you a better browsing experience. Without them, we’d have no way to remember anything about you, such as whether you’re logged in.
In this policy, we’ve explained how and why we use cookies, and what each of them do. Cookies can be divided into four groups:
- Strictly necessary cookies. We need these cookies to run our website — they let us save your cookie preferences, and keep the site secure.
- Cookies that give you a better browsing experience. These let us tailor the site to your needs, like displaying it in the same language as your web browser. We’ll sometimes refer to them as functionality cookies.
- Cookies that help us improve our products. These let us use tools that show us how you interact with our site. They help us find and fix problems for our customers, and they’re also known as analytical or performance cookies.
- Cookies that keep our marketing costs down. These improve our marketing — helping us to spend less on sites like Google, and more on charging as little as we can.
You can see each cookie we use and our reasons for using them below.
| Technology | Purpose | Session or Persistent | Lifespan | Third parties |
| STRICTLY NECESSARY COOKIES | ||||
| Cloudflare | We use the __cfduid cookie to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings. This helps us to stop malicious traffic and spam across our site. We also use the __cfruid cookie for our rate-limiting policies. Cloudflare provides web optimisation and security services that we use to improve and protect our websites, including a reverse proxy, pass-through security service, and a content distribution network. | Persistent | 1 year | Cloudflare |
| gid | This cookie helps us identify users for our own internal purposes. By recognising unique browsers, we can more accurately measure the total number of users visiting our site from different locations on the web. | Persistent | 1 year | No third parties involved |
| twCookieConsent | This is essential for letting us remember your choice of cookie consent. | Persistent | 6 months | No third parties involved |
| COOKIES THAT HELP US IMPROVE OUR PRODUCT | ||||
| Google Analytics | The _gat and gat# cookies are installed by Google Universal Analytics to throttle the request ratetolimitthe collection of data on high traffic sites. | Session | 1 minute | |
| Google Analytics | We use the _gid cookie to store information on how visitors use a website and helps in creating an analytics report of how the website is doing. The data includes the number of visitors, where they came from,and the pages visited in an anonymous form. | Persistent | 1 day | |
| Google Analytics | We use _ga cookie to calculate visitor, session, campaign data and keep track of site usage for the site’s analytics report. It stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly-generated number to identify unique visitors. | Persistent | 2 years | |
| iz_uh_ps | We use the iz_uh_ps cookie to store data about a user relating to the number of site visits and survey views,which enables us to make a decision about whether we should undertake a survey about the use of our site. | Persistent | 1 year | Informizely |
How to block cookies
You can choose to block cookies by activating the settings on your browser that allow 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 parts of the website. Your browser settings also allow you to delete all cookies stored on your device whenever you wish.
How to control cookies
The UK Information Commissioner’s Office has provided the following guidance on controlling cookies:
- A number of websites provide detailed information on cookies, including AboutCookies.org and AllAboutCookies.org.
- The European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance website Your Online Choices allows you to install opt-out cookies across different advertising networks.
- Google has developed a browser add-on to allow users to opt-out of Google Analytics across all websites which use it. This is also available in the Chrome web store.
- Some browsers include a feature known as ‘Do Not Track’ or DNT. This allows you to indicate a preference that websites should not track you. However, whilst DNT is available in many browsers, websites are not required to recognise its request, so it may not always work. You can get help on how to use DNT in Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera.
- For more information on how private browsing works as well as its limitations, visit the support pages for your browser: Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari (IOS (mobile) and desktop) and Opera.
If you are concerned about online tracking then we can recommend you:
- Install a privacy-friendly browser on your device, such as Mozilla Firefox, Firefox Focus or Brave;
- Install anti-tracking and ad-blocking plug-ins on that browser, such as Ad Block Plus, Ghostery or PrivacyBadger; and
- Use privacy-friendly web search engines, such as DuckDuckGo or Quant.
If you have any questions about the cookies or similar technologies in use on our website, please send an email to [email protected]
