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.
Following is a table of our use of cookies with the duration we have set.
_ga – used to distinguish users
Duration: 2 years
_gid – used to distinguish users
Duration: 24 hours
_gat – used for throttle data request rate
Duration: 1 minute
_gac_<property-id> – linking up Google adword account (this may be on landing pages for the advert account)
Duration: 90 days
_atuvc, _atuvcs – used for social media sharing
Duration: 2 years
__bb2_screener – used for security of the website to make sure request is not coming from a spammer
Duration: till end of session
Youtube Cookies – we have embedded videos from youtube so following cookies may get set too:
PREF – Duration 8 months
VSC – Duration till end of the session
VSITOR_INFO1_LIVE – Duration 8 months
remote_sid – Duration till end of session
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/
