Cookies on our Web Site

This site, like many other sites, uses small files called cookies to help customise your experience. Find out more about cookies and how you can control them.

Quick description of cookies

'Cookies' are small text files that are stored by the browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or Safari) or by a mobile phone (e.g. Android or iPhone) on your computer or mobile device. They allow websites to store such things as user preferences. You can think of cookies as providing a "memory" for the website, enabling it to recognise a user and respond appropriately.

Cookies and their use

There are different types of cookies based on their use:

  • Some cookies we use to remember your preferences for tools found on our web sites, so you don't have to reenter them each time you switch a page or each time you visit. They will remember your user login, the language you prefer and other things such as what video streaming speeds you use.
  • Some are created and used by web analytics software (such as Google Analytics) to track how many individual unique users we have, and how often they visit the site. Unless you are signed in to the site, these cookies cannot be used to identify you personally. If you are logged in, the login process links you to your stored membership record that includes your username and email address.
  • Some cookies are used by geo-targeting software which tries to identify what country you are in based on the information supplied by your browser when it requests a web page. This cookie is completely anonymous, and is only used to help target content - such as whether you see our UK or another home page - and advertising.
  • When you register with us, we generate cookies that signal whether you are signed in or not. We use these cookies to determine which account you are signed in with, and if you should get access to a service. It also allows us to associate any comments you post with your cookies
  • On some of our pages, third parties may also set their own anonymous cookies, for the purposes of tracking the use of their application, or tailoring the application for you. Because of how cookies work, we cannot access these cookies, nor can the third parties access the data in cookies used by us. As an example, when you share an article using a social media sharing button on our sites, the social network that has created the button will record that you have done this.

 

Turning off cookies

Most browsers and phones have a way to stop accepting classes of cookies, or to stop it accepting cookies from a particular website. For example, using cookies is needed in order to use our shopping cart, so you would not be able to buy things through our web site if you turned off our cookies.

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