Privacy & Cookies
Our website uses cookies, as do almost all websites. The purpose of these is to help provide you with the best experience possible.
Cookies are small text files stored by your browser on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.
Our cookies enable us to:
• Make our website work as expected
• Improve the speed/security of the site
• Continuously improve our website for you
• Track visits to the sites articles so we know what kind of information is popular for our visitors
We do not use cookies to:
• Collect any personally identifiable information
• Collect any sensitive information
• Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
• You can learn more about all the cookies we use below
Granting us permission to use cookies
If the settings on your web browser are set to accept cookies we understand because of that, and your continued use of our website, you are in agreement of how we use cookies. Should you wish to remove or disable cookies please follow the instructions below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.
More about our Cookies
Website Function Cookies
Our own cookies
We use cookies to make certain functions on our website work including:
• Blocking the ip addresses of known or potential hackers
There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site or disabling them in your browser settings.
Third party functions
Like most websites we include functionality provided by third parties. Our site includes the following which may use cookies:
• Google Maps
• Other embedded content
• Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties
Visitor Statistics Cookies
We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac OS X or Windows PC) which helps to identify how our site works on particular platforms. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called “analytics” programs also tell us, on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from google) and whether they have been here before helping us develop our services.
Google Analytics - you can opt-out of being tracked by Google Analytics (we'd prefer you didn't though as this data is seriously helpful to us in improving our website and therefore your experience on it https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout )
Turning Cookies Off
You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our, and a large proportion of the world's, websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.
Mozilla Firefox
To block cookies or change cookie settings in Firefox, select ‘options' then choose ‘privacy'. Since Firefox accepts cookies by default, select “use custom settings for history”. This will bring up additional options where you can uncheck ‘accept cookies from sites' or set exceptions, ‘accept third party cookies', and decide how long cookies will be stored (till they expire, till you close the browser, or ask you every time). You can also see the list of stored cookies and delete those you don't want manually. You also have the option of deleting all cookies either from the history window or the privacy window. Permissions for blocking or allowing cookies for single sites can also be set via the Permissions tab.
Google Chrome
To block cookies or change cookie settings in Google Chrome, click on the wrench (spanner) on the browser toolbar. Choose ‘settings', then ‘under the hood'. Find the ‘privacy' section and click on ‘content settings'. Then click on ‘cookies' and you will get four options allowing you to delete cookies, allow or block all cookies by default or set cookie preferences for particular sites or domains.
Internet Explorer
To block cookies or change cookie settings in Internet Explorer, select Tools (or the gear icon), Internet Options, Privacy. You can choose from a number of security settings including Accept All Cookies, Block All Cookies and intermediate settings that affect cookie storage based on privacy and whether cookies set allow third parties to contact you without your explicit consent.
Safari
To block cookies or change cookie settings in Safari 5.0 and earlier, go to Preferences, Security and then Accept Cookies. You can choose from Always, Only from sites you navigate to or Never. In Safari 5.1 and later go to Preferences, Privacy. In the Block cookies section choose Always, Never or From third parties and advertisers.
You now have all the information you need to manage and delete cookies, but please don't forget that doing so might mean the web doesn't look quite the way you would expect.