Cookies on this website

What are 'cookies'?

'Cookies' are small text files that are stored by the browser (for example, Internet Explorer or Safari) on your computer or mobile phone. They allow websites to store things like user preferences. You can think of cookies as providing a 'memory' for the website, so that it can recognise you when you come back and respond appropriately.

How does our website use cookies?

A visit to a page on our website may generate the following types of cookie:

• Anonymous analytics cookies
• Advertising cookies

Anonymous analytics cookies:

Every time someone visits our website, software provided by another organisation generates an 'anonymous analytics cookie'.

These cookies can tell us whether or not you have visited the site before.
Your browser will tell us if you have these cookies and, if you don't, we generate new ones. This allows us to track how many individual users we have, and how often they visit the site.

Unless you are signed in to our website, we cannot use these cookies to identify individuals. We use them to gather statistics, for example, the number of visits to a page. If you are logged in, we will also know the details you gave to us for this, such as your username and email address.

Advertising cookies

These cookies allow us to know whether or not you've seen an advert or a type of advert, and how long it is since you've seen it.

We also use cookies to help us use targeted advertising. We may use cookies set by another organization so we can more accurately target advertising to you. For example, we may show adverts about holidays if you have recently visited the travel section of our site. These cookies are anonymous – they store information about what you are looking at on our site, but not about who you are.

We also set anonymous cookies on certain other sites that we advertise on. If you receive one of those cookies, we may then use it to identify you as having visited that site if you later visit our website. We can then target our advertising based on this information.

How do I turn cookies off?

It is usually possible to stop your browser accepting cookies, or to stop it accepting cookies from a particular website. However, we cannot tell if you are signed in without using cookies, so you would not be able to post comments.

All modern browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. You can usually find these settings in the 'options' or 'preferences' menu of your browser. To understand these settings, the following links may be helpful, or you can use the 'Help' option in your browser for more details.

Cookie settings in Internet Explorer
Cookie settings in Firefox
Cookie settings in Chrome
Cookie settings in Safari web and iOS.

If you are primarily concerned about third party cookies generated by advertisers, you can turn these off by going to the Your Online Choices site.

You can also visit the trade body representing these advertising platforms for more information: Network Advertising Initative.

They have provided a site a site where you can control all third-party online advertising. Please note that there are many more networks listed on this site than those that we use at our news and blog sections.

Useful links

If you would like to find out more about cookies and their use on the Internet, you may find the following links useful:

Microsoft Cookies guide
All About Cookies

The IAB has provided the following website to give information specifically about privacy issues around Internet advertising:
youronlinechoices.co.uk/uk

For further legal information about privacy issues, you may find these links useful:

Data Protection Act 1998
The Information Commissioner's Office

If you would like to contact us about cookies please email us on contacts listed in contact page.