Cookies?  What, for the love of English, are cookies?

They are not these: smart_cookie

They are these:-

Cookies are small text files that can be placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites, they are often needed to help with the functionality of a website.

Cookies help our sites to:

  • Work as you’d expect
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
  • Offer free services/content through sponsorship and advertising

We do not use cookies to:

  • Collect any sensitive information
  • Sell any data to third parties

Granting us permission to use cookies

If the settings on the software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies, we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are okay with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our (or any other) site you can turn them off, however doing so will likely mean that some sites will not work as you would expect.

Website Functionality and Cookies

Cookies help our websites to function. There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our sites.

Social Website Cookies

So you can easily share our content on social networking sites, we have included sharing buttons on our sites.

The privacy implications of this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks. We recommend you check the privacy settings on any social network you use.

Visitor Statistics Cookies

We gather some visitor statistics, such as how many people have visited us, what type of technology they are using.  This helps us to improve our website functionality.   (We have chosen to anonymize all IP addresses on this site.  Read more about anonymization here.)

Advertising Cookies

Cookies are widely used in online advertising. We do not use targeted advertising, so our advertising partners cannot gain personally identifiable information from these cookies.

You can learn more about online advertising at http://www.youronlinechoices.com. You can opt-out of almost all advertising cookies at  http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices, although we would prefer that you didn’t as ultimately adverts help keep much of the internet free. It is also worth noting that opting out of advertising cookies will not mean you won’t see any adverts, just not the kind of adverts you have blocked.

Sites often show adverts and in our case the adverts are managed by partners who specialise in providing adverts for multiple sites.
On this site we use:

Google AdSense
JetPack
Disqus – as a commenting system.

Invariably these partners place cookies to collect anonymous data about the websites you visit.

Turning Cookies off

You are in control and you can switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies, you can learn how here.

!Note – Switching cookies off will limit the functionality on some parts of our sites.

If you are worried about security, rather than switching off cookies in your browser, you may find that anti-spyware / malware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting any cookies considered to be invasive.

If you are on the internet, you need to install security software.