Cookie Policy

Background

Cookie legislation was introduced in the revision of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, 2003, updated 2011. The forthcoming ePrivacy Directive may make changes to the rules on cookies which will be included in a later update of this Cookie Policy.

Why do we use Cookies?

Our use of cookies is to primarily help enhance your user experience and to improve the efficiency of our website. We use certain cookies to remember you when you visit the website, to keep track of browsing patterns and to understand how visitors use the website site.

What are Cookies?

Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website. There are different types of cookies: some are essential for the site to operate properly, whereas others are aimed at enhancing and personalising your user experience. Cookies can help us to understand how consumers are interacting with our website, which helps us to improve our site and deliver a better service to you.

What Cookies do we use?

Strictly necessary Cookies

Generally, these cookies will be essential first-party session cookies. Not all first-party session cookies will fall into the strictly necessary category for the purposes of the Cookie legislation. Strictly necessary cookies will generally be used to store a unique identifier to manage and identify the user as unique to other users currently viewing the website, in order to provide a consistent and accurate service to the user.

Essential Cookies

These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as signing-up to receive emails from us.

Performance Cookies

These cookies generally collect information about how visitors use our website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and the pages that they don’t. This helps us to understand and improve the site so it is easy to use and includes helpful content. They allow us to fix bugs or glitches on the website. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies visitors, so we can’t identify you. For example, we use “Google Analytics” cookies (a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc).

Functionality Cookies

These cookies allow our website to remember the choices you make as you browse the site. They provide more enhanced and personal features. The information collected is anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other sites once you leave our site.

The following cookies are set by this website:

Cookie Name Purpose Expiry
_ga Used to distinguish users. 2 years
_gid Used to distinguish users. 24 hours
catAccCookies This cookie is set in your computer to prevent the notification from coming up again 1 month
wp-settings-1,
wp-settings-time-1
WordPress sets a few wp-settings-[UID] cookies.
The number on the end is your individual user ID from the users database table.
This is used to customize your view of admin interface, and possibly also the main site interface.
1 year
wordpress_logged_in_[hash] After login, wordpress sets the wordpress_logged_in_[hash] cookie, which indicates when you’re logged in, and who you are, for most interface use. Session only
wordpress_sec_[hash] This cookie is used to store your authentication details. Its use is limited to the admin console area, /wp-admin/ Session only
Third Party cookies
__stid Part of the ShareThis sharing button functionality. Unique identifiers given to each computer to allow traffic analysis to ShareThis. ShareThis includes a link in their pop-up box which allows users to specify “Do not track” which deletes cookies as required. 1 year
__unam The “__unam” cookie is set as part of the ShareThis service and monitors “click-stream” activity, e.g. web pages viewed, navigation from page to page, time spent on each page etc. 9 months
 _vwo_uuid_v2,
contently_insights_user
 These cookies check for any campaigns or tests we have running, such as split testing, conversion rates and optimisation.  3 months
_gaexp Used to determine a user’s inclusion in an experiment and the expiry of experiments a user has been included in.  3 months
Mp_ These web analytics cookies, provided by MixPanel, are used to collect information.  1 year

How to turn off Cookies

You can turn off cookies at any time, by going into your browser settings, however this may have a detrimental effect on your user experience. If you are happy to continue letting us use cookies in the ways set out in this policy, to help us guide our work, then you need not do anything.

For more information go to http://www.allaboutcookies.org/