Introduction

This cookie notice is for visitors to our websites, apps, and digital platforms. It sets out how we use cookies.

What are cookies?

For almost any modern website to work correctly, it needs to collect certain basic information on its users. To do this, a site will create cookies – small text files – on its users’ computers, tablets, or mobile devices. These cookies are designed to allow the website to recognize its users on subsequent visits or authorize other designated websites to identify them for a particular purpose.

Cookies do a lot of different jobs, which make your experience of the Internet much smoother and more interactive. For instance, they are us to remember your preferences on sites you often visit, your user ID, and the contents of your shopping baskets, and help you navigate between pages more efficiently. They also help ensure that the advertisements that you see online are more relevant to you and your interests. Some data collected is designed to detect browsing patterns and approximate geographical locations to improve user experience.

Some websites may also use web beacons (also known as pixels or tags) to collect information embedded in images. Web beacons only collect limited information, including a cookie number, a timestamp, and a record of the page on which they are placed. Websites may also carry web beacons placed by third-party advertisers. These beacons do not carry any personally identifiable information and are only used to track the effectiveness of a particular campaign (for example, by counting the number of visitors).

Information collected by cookies is now classed as personal data.

How do we use cookies?

We collect several cookies from our users for various reasons, not least to track our performance – but also to let us serve you content tailored to your specifications, hopefully improving your overall experience of the website. Amongst other things, the cookies we use allow users to register to make comments and allow us to calculate how many visitors we have and how long they stay on our site.

We do our utmost to respect users’ privacy. We use cookies to monitor and improve our services. Still, they also allow us to sell advertising campaigns tailored to your interests and reading behavior on our web, which helps keep our content accessible to our readers. We sometimes include links on our site to goods and services offered by third parties, and we may be paid some commission if you subsequently decide to make a purchase. Cookies may be used to track your visits to third-party sites to help ensure that we are paid the correct amounts. Please note that these commercial arrangements do not influence our editorial content in any way.

Your site experience would be adversely affected if you opted out of the cookies we use.

What types of cookies are there, and which ones do we use?

There are two types of cookies:

Persistent cookies remain on a user’s device for a fixed period specified in the cookie. They have activated each time the user visits the website that created that particular cookie.

Session cookies are temporary. They allow website operators to link the actions of a user during a browser session. An nA browser session starts when a user opens the browser window and finishes when they close it. Once you close the browser, all session cookies are deleted.

Cookies also have, broadly speaking, four different functions and can be categorized as follow: ‘strictly necessary’ cookies, ‘performance’ cookies, ‘functionality’ cookies, and ‘targeting’ or ‘advertising’ cookies.

Strictly necessary cookies are essential for navigating a website and using its features. Without them, you wouldn’t be able to use essential services like registration or shopping baskets. These cookies do not gather information about you that could be used for marketing or remembering where you`ve been on the Internet.

Performance cookies collect data for statistical purposes on how visitors use a website. They don’t contain personal information such as names and email addresses and are used to improve your experience of a site. Examples of how we use ‘strictly necessary cookies include:

• Setting unique identifiers for each unique visitor so that site numbers can be analyzed.

Here are some examples of how we use performance cookies:

• Gathering data about visits to the website, including numbers of visitors and visits, length of time spent on the site, pages clicked on, or where visitors have come from.

• For comparison with other websites using data collected by industry-accepted measurements and companies.

Information supplied by performance cookies helps us to understand how you use the website; for example, whether or not you have visited before, what you looked at or clicked on, and how you found us. We can then use this data to help improve our services. We generally use independent analytics companies to perform these services for us. When this is the case, these cookies may be set by a third-party company (third-party cookies).

If you have registered with the website, we can combine the data from the web analytics services and their cookies with the information you have supplied to us so that we can make your experience more personal by recommending specific articles to you based on your reading behavior or tailoring your emails with the content you might find more interesting. We will only do this if you let us communicate with you. Sometimes the data from the web analytics companies has been collected before you registered or signed in. In these cases, if we use this data to identify you, we use it only in accordance with our privacy notice.

Functionality cookies allow users to customize how a website looks for them: they can remember usernames, language preferences, and regions. They can be used to provide more personal services like local weather reports and traffic news.

Here are some examples of how we use functionality cookies:

• Storing your user preferences on Your Account page

• Remember if you’ve been to the site before so that messages intended for first-time users are not displayed to you.

Advertising cookies are used to deliver advertisements more relevant to you, but they can also limit the number of times you see an advertisement and be used to chart the effectiveness of an ad campaign by tracking users’ clicks. They can also provide security in transactions. They are usually placed by third-party advertising networks with a website operator’s permission but can be identified by the operator. They can remember that you have visited a website, and this information can be shared with other organizations, including advertisers. They cannot determine who you are, though, as the data collected is never linked to your profile.

• Interest-based advertising (or online behavioral advertising) is where our third-party service providers place cookies on your device, which remember your web browsing activity and group together your interests to provide targeted advertisements that are more relevant to you when you visit webnack.com. Your previous web browsing activity can also be used to infer things about you, such as your demographics (age, gender, etc.). This information may also be used to make the advertising on webnack.com more relevant to you. The main ways we use advertising cookies are set out below:

• ‘Retargeting’ is a form of interest-based advertising that enables our advertising partners to show you advertisements selected based on your online browsing activity away from the website. This allows companies to advertise to people who previously visited their website. These cookies will usually be placed on your device by third-party advertising networks, and we have listed the leading third-party networks we work with in our consent management platform.

• Social media. Occasionally we advertise our products and services to our readers on social media. This could be to promote our subscription offers or events. We use cookies to help with this process, and the social media operator (Facebook, for example) can recognize Webnack users on their platform and serve them advertisements on our behalf. By managing your preferences in our consent management platform, you can opt out of this process.

These cookies are necessary for online advertisements you encounter to be more relevant to you and your interests.

How do I manage my cookies?

You should be aware that any preferences will be lost if you delete all cookies, and many websites will not work correctly, or you will lose some functionality. We do not recommend turning cookies off when using our website for these reasons.

Most browsers accept cookies automatically, but you can alter your browser settings to erase cookies or prevent automatic acceptance if you prefer. Generally, you have the option to see what cookies you’ve got and delete them individually, block third party cookies or cookies from particular sites, accept all cookies, be notified when a cookie is issued, or reject all cookies. Visit the ‘options’ or ‘preferences’ menu on your browser to change settings, and check the following links for more browser-specific information.