Cookies and how they benefit you
Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.
Our cookies help us:
- Make our website work as you’d expect
- Remember your settings during and between visits
- Offer you free services/content (thanks to advertising)
- Improve the speed/security of the site
- Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
- Continuously improve our website for you
- Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do)
We do not use cookies to:
- Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
- Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
- Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
- Pay sales commissions
You can learn more about all the cookies we use below.
Granting us permission to use cookies
If the settings on your 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 fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.
More about our cookies
Our own cookies
We use cookies to make our website work including:
- Remembering your search settings
- Remembering if we have already asked you certain questions (e.g. you declined to use our app or take our survey)
There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.
Third party cookies
Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following which use cookies:
- Disqus (Privacy Policy) enables our users to add comments to our site
- YouTube (Privacy Policy) allows us to embed videos on our site
Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.
Social website cookies
So you can easily “Like” or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site. Cookies are set by:
- AddThis (Privacy Policy) provide us with lots of sharing buttons all in one neat package
The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.
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 or Windows, which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called “analytics” programs also tell us how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before helping us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of marketing spend.
We use:
- Google Analytics (Privacy Policy) enables us to compile visitor statistics
- Efficient Frontier (Privacy Policy) simply helps us monitor our adverts on search engines
Advertising cookies
Cookies are widely used in online advertising. Neither us, advertisers or our advertising partners can gain personally identifiable information from these cookies. We only work with advertising partners who work to accepted privacy standards such as http://www.youronlinechoices.com/goodpractice.
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 adverts, just simply that they won’t be tailored to you any longer.
We use:
- DoubleClick (Privacy Policy) owned by Google
- Atlas Solutions (Privacy Policy)
- Criteo (Privacy Policy)
- Mookie1 (Privacy Policy)
Banner adverts
We fund our site by showing adverts as you browse our site. These adverts are usually managed by a partner specialising in providing adverts for multiple sites. Invariably these partners place cookies to collect anonymous data about the websites you visit so they can personalise the adverts to you, ensure that you don’t see the same adverts too frequently and ultimately report to advertisers on which adverts are working.
Turning cookies off
You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies (learn how here). Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our’s and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.
It may be that your concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with anti-spyware software.