Cookies
Cookies are created when you visit a website or use an app. They are basically small text files that are stored on your device and customise your experience. That file may store some info about your preferences based on anything you set last time you visited us. We also use cookies for other reasons, like advertising and marketing, experimenting with different layouts on the website, measuring your visits to the site and understanding your preferences. This means we can show you personalised advertising, offers and content that are just for you. Otherwise, by continuing to use our websites, content, products or services, you agree to the use of cookies as described in this notice. Cookies are an important part of the internet. They make using devices and accessing online information much smoother and affect lots of the useful features of websites. There are many different uses for cookies, but they fall into four main groups.
• Cookies that are needed to provide the content, product or service you have asked for
Some cookies are essential to help your devices download or stream the information, or so you can move around websites and use their features. Without these cookies, content, products or services you’ve asked for can’t be provided. Here are some examples of essential cookies:
Positioning information on a smartphone screen, tablet device or other screen so that you can see the website and use its functionality. Without cookies, you might have to repeatedly adjust your volume and viewing settings. Some are session cookies which make it possible to navigate through the website smoothly.
• Improving your browsing experience
Cookies allow the application or website to remember choices you make, such as your language or region, and they provide improved features. Here are a few examples of some of the ways that cookies are used to improve your experience on our applications and websites:
Remembering your preferences and settings, including marketing preferences, such as choosing whether you wish to receive marketing information.
Remembering if you’ve filled in a survey, so you’re not asked to do it again.
Remembering if you’ve been to the application or website before.
Restricting the number of times you’re shown a particular online advertisement. This is sometimes called ‘frequency capping’.
Showing you information that’s relevant to content, products or services that you receive.
Giving you access to content provided by social-media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
Showing ‘related article’ links that are relevant to the information you’re looking at.
Remembering an application or website you’ve entered, such as weather forecasts.
• Analytics
We like to keep track of what websites, information and links are popular and which ones don’t get used so much, to help us keep our information relevant and up to date. It’s also very useful to be able to identify trends of how people navigate (find their way through) our information and when and where ‘error messages’ may originate. This group of cookies, often called ‘analytics cookies’, are used to gather this information. The information collected is grouped with the information from everyone else’s cookies. We can then see the overall patterns of usage rather than any one person’s activity. Analytics cookies are used to improve how an application, a website and its pages work. Our applications, web locations, websites and communications you get from us contain small invisible images known as ‘web beacons’ or ‘ pixels’. These are used to manage the interaction between you and the online information or email and allow us to assess the effectiveness of the communication.
• Affiliate cookies
We do not use ‘affiliate’ cookies.