What are 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 webpage 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. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. This may prevent you from taking full advantage of the website.

Does this site create or use cookies?

This site does not create any of its ‘own’ cookies, but it does generate a third-party Google Analytics cookie so we can gauge our visitors and traffic rates.

This is standard practice across many websites and we use this information to identify future areas of improvement.

We also use a Twitter Analytics cookie so we can guage the effectivness of our social media, again this is a standard practice, common to many website across the web.

How do we use this information?

We do not store personal data, user information, responses or any other information beyond what is needed to allow the website to operate effectively.

What if you don’t even want Google or Twitter to store Cookies! Is there anything you can do to stop this?

If you want to stop Google from tracking your visits to sites which use its Analytics (and other) products, then you can use the Google Opt-Out Tool.

It installs into your browser and will stop ALL sites utilising Analytics from creating cookies or including you in the visitor statitics.

More information regarding twitter’s privacy policy may be found here: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170405.