Cookies

(1) Strictly necessary

These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website. Without these cookies the services you have asked for like shopping baskets or electronic billing, cannot be provided.

Here are some examples of essential cookies:

Keeping you logged in during your visit; without cookies you might have to log in on every page you go to.
When you add something to the online shopping basket, cookies make sure it’s still there when you get to the checkout.
Some are session cookies which make it possible to navigate through the website smoothly. However these are automatically deleted after you close your web browser.

(2) Performance

These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and they let you store items in your shopping basket between visits. They may also show us which email or web page visitors clicked through from in order to visit our website, and whether you opened an email we sent you. Some of these are analytics cookies, set using third party web analytics software, which allow us to monitor our website traffic. For example, we use Google Analytics to help us do this.

To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites visit http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. Alternatively, if you do not accept the use of these cookies please leave the website.

Here are a few examples of just some of the ways that cookies are used to improve your experience on our websites:

• Remembering your preferences and settings, including marketing preferences.
• Remembering if you’ve filled in a survey, so you’re not asked to do it again.
• Remembering if you’ve been to the site before. If you are a first-time user, you might see different content to a regular user.
• Restricting the number of times you’re shown a particular advertisment. This is sometimes called ‘frequency capping’.
• Showing you information that’s relevant to products of ours that you have.
• Enabling social media components, like Facebook or Twitter.
• Showing ‘related article’ links that are relevant to the page you’re looking at.
• Remembering a location you’ve entered such as weather forecasts.

(3) Functionality

These cookies allow the website to remember choices you make such as your username, language or the region you are in and provide enhanced, more personal features. For instance, a website may be able to provide you with local weather reports or traffic news by storing in a cookie the region in which you are currently located. These cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts and other parts of web pages you can customise. They may also be used to provide services you have asked for such as watching a video or commenting on a blog. The information these cookies collect may be anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other websites.

You can control whether or not these cookies are used, but preventing them may mean we can’t offer you some services, and will reduce the support we can offer you. It’s also possible that preventing these cookie stops us remembering that you didn’t want a specific service. We like to keep track of what pages and links are popular and which ones don’t get used so much to help us keep our sites 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 sites and if they get ‘error messages’ from web pages.

This group of cookies, often called ‘analytics cookies’ are used to gather this information. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies you. The information collected is anonymous and is grouped with the information from everyone else’s cookies.

(4) Targeting

‘Targeting’ cookies are linked to services provided by third parties, such as ‘Like’ buttons and ‘Share’ buttons. The third party provides these services in return for recognising that you have visited our website.

We use ‘Targeting’ cookies to Link to social networks like Facebook, who may subsequently use information about your visit to target advertising to you on other websites.

You can control whether or not these cookies are used, but preventing them may stop us from offering you some services. All of these cookies are managed by third parties, and you may alternatively use the third parties’ own tools to prevent these cookies.

Here are some examples of the Targeting Cookies we use.

• a unique name set by the site that generated it
• a value – the information within it that recalls your previous activities
• an expiration date, which determines how long the cookie will remain active in your browser before being automatically deleted.

Internet Explorer

1. Select the Tools menu
2. Select Delete Browsing History
3. Select the Cookies checkbox
4. Select Delete

Google Chrome

1. Navigate to the Cookies section of your Chrome browser
2. Select Remove All

Firefox

1. Select the FireFox menu
2. Select the Privacy tab
3. Select the History section
4. Select Remove Individual Cookies

Safari

1. Select the Gears menu
2. Select Reset Safari
3. Select the Remove all website data checkbox
4. Select Reset