Cookie Policy

The cook­ies I use

I am reg­is­tered with Google Ana­lyt­ics and this keeps cook­ies to keep track of the how vis­i­tors are using the site. The user data is anony­mous.

I also use Stat­Counter which holds for a short time (usu­ally about 5 days) logs of all accesses to the blog. This is used at an aggre­gate level to assess the num­ber of vis­its and the most pop­u­lar pages.  Indi­vid­ual data such as ISP provider and loca­tion are col­lected but no per­sonal data.  The logs are   anony­mous to the extent that an IP Address is anony­mous

I use third-party cook­ies with some of  plug-ins – for exam­ple, but­tons for shar­ing or lik­ing con­tent that “keep count” of likes via the use of a cookie.

Links to other websites

I often link to other web­sites to enable you to visit other web­sites of inter­est eas­ily. How­ever, once you have used these links to leave my blog, you should note that I don’t have any con­trol over that other web­site. There­fore, I can­not be respon­si­ble for the pro­tec­tion and pri­vacy of any infor­ma­tion which you pro­vide whilst vis­it­ing such sites and such sites are not gov­erned by this pri­vacy state­ment. 

You should exer­cise cau­tion and look at the pri­vacy state­ment applic­a­ble to the web­site in question

What are Cookies

Cook­ies are small text files that are placed on your device/computer by a web­site or read from your device by a web­site. These files con­tain only text and are usu­ally used to remem­ber some­thing to make a web­site visit more pleas­ant. An exam­ple would be your user ID so that you do not need to log into every sin­gle page vis­ited. Cook­ies could also be used to remem­ber pref­er­ences or set­tings. Cook­ies do not gen­er­ally store per­sonal infor­ma­tion, they are often used in aggre­gate (summed up to give counts of things) and often con­tain ran­domly gen­er­ated num­bers.

Cook­ies can­not carry virus’s and can­not install any­thing harm­ful to your com­puter. They are just text files

Cook­ies are safe as they are just plain text files

For more details about cook­ies visit allaboutcookies.org

Or have a read on the BBC Pol­icy which also explains things very well

http://www.bbc.co.uk/privacy/cookies/about/?source_url=/privacy/bbc-cookies-policy.shtml

Should I Keep Cook­ies Turned On?

Cook­ies gen­er­ally are good for web­sites and in gen­eral some fea­tures of web­sites will not work with­out cook­ies; this is because the inter­net is “state­less” — if I access a web­site and then “Fred” accessed a web­site and we both want to buy a prod­uct on that site the pages of the web­site needs to know which user of the site is me (Kel­log­gsville) and which is “Fred”. It does this by sav­ing a “mem­ory” of the site visit to the users browser by using cook­ies.

So it is a good idea to accept cook­ies as they are safe and they make parts of web­sites work.

Pos­si­ble Types of Cookies

Cook­ies can have var­i­ous “types”. The can be “First Party” — which means that the cookie is set by the site vis­ited by the user; they can be “Third Party” which means that even though a user vis­its a par­tic­u­lar site another site may set a cookie. This usu­ally occurs when a third party website’s ser­vice is used in the first site — for instance show­ing a feed of twit­ter posts or show­ing a “buy” link from Ama­zon.

Both third party cook­ies and first party cook­ies can both be either “Ses­sion cook­ies” or “Per­sis­tent cook­ies”. A ses­sion cookie is only saved in the browsers mem­ory and is never writ­ten to the hard drive. Ses­sion cook­ies expire as soon as the user closes the browser. A per­sis­tent cookie has a spec­i­fied life time set by its expi­ra­tion date. This date can be any amount of time. The longer the per­sis­tence the longer your browser will remem­ber the set­tings of the web­site that you have visited.

Turn­ing Off Cookies

If you wish to turn off cook­ies you can do this by using browser cookie pref­er­ence set­tings. The help menu of your cho­sen browser will help you do this.

and http://www.aboutcookies.org/Default.aspx?page=1 will tell you how for most browsers


I have taken some of this infor­ma­tion from the pri­vacy pol­icy at http://www.petefinnigan.com