“Cookies” are small pieces of data (often text files) that are placed on your computer or device by our services that you visit. As a standard feature of major browser applications, cookies are widely used to make online services work or operate more efficiently, as well as to provide info to the owners of those online services about your browsing experiences. When you return to those same online services again, your browser sends the previously stored cookies back to the online service, which allows it to recognise you and remember important info to make your use of the online services more personalized or convenient, such as by remembering your saved preferences.

Although cookies serve many valuable functions, you may prefer to not allow them or to limit their use. Many browsers give you the ability to manage cookies to suit you by changing your browser settings. For example, some browsers will allow you to set up rules to manage cookies on a site by site basis, which gives you the ability to disallow cookies from some sites that you do not trust. More info about cookies and details of how to manage or disable them can be found at http://www.allaboutcookies.org and http://www.aboutcookies.org.

PLEASE NOTE: if you choose to disable cookies or other tracking technologies on our services, your experience may be diminished and some of our services’ features and functionality may not work as intended.

Our services use different kinds of cookies to run properly. Depending on the nature of your interactions with us, some or all of the types of cookies identified below may be stored in your browser by us and our partners. Additional info about the choices that may be available to you with respect to our use of cookies and similar technologies can be found in "How Do I Manage Tracking Technologies?". The different kinds of cookies are explained below.

Essential Cookies — “Essential Cookies” are critical to supporting our services’ intended functionality. They allow you to do things like move around our services, use its core services, and access its key features. Without these Essential Cookies, our services will not perform as smoothly for you as we would like it to, and we may not be able to provide our services or certain related content, services and features you request.
Process Cookies and Security Cookies are two examples of Essential Cookies that may be used on our services. Process Cookies make our services work by supporting and delivering services that you expect, such as being able to navigate between pages or accessing secured portions. Security Cookies provide necessary checks and controls to protect both you and us. Among other things, they help us to authenticate your use, prevent fraudulent use of access credentials, and maintain the confidentiality of your data.

Preference Cookies — “Preference Cookies” help us remember certain info about your choices, preferences, and browsing behaviour to enhance your experience on our services. For example, they allow us to better personalise your visits to our services by remembering things like your preferred region, language, or display settings. Many of the features should still work without Preference Cookies however your experience may be less functional and you may need to re-enter your preferences each time you visit.
Preference Cookies on our services may store info like your selected language and geographic region to help us show you appropriate options and display content accordingly when you return to our services. For example, by remembering your region and language, our services may be able to provide you with local articles or schedules for upcoming events in your area, and do so in your local language. We may also use Preference Cookies to capture visual settings (such as, text size, font, resolution, etc.), reference websites, the sequence of pages within our services that you visit, and other similar details about your browsing behaviour and choices about how our services behave or look. This helps us to, among other things, monitor and improve our services, personalize your browsing experience, and facilitate return visits.

Analytics & Performance Cookies — “Analytics & Performance Cookies” collect info about your interactions with our services, which helps us to monitor and improve the services we offer. For example, they help us understand which pages are the most frequently visited, identify when you may encounter difficulties, and determine whether our advertising is effective or not, as well as how to improve the content for our advertising partners. In other words, they allow us to see overall patterns of usage on our services, analyse general traffic, and show the ways you interact with our services.
Please note that we may also engage partners from time-to-time to help us better understand how you interact with our services, including by placing Analytics & Performance Cookies on our behalf. For example, we use third-party analytics providers like Google Analytics to help evaluate and report on use of our services. These companies may set and read their own tracking technologies to gather info about your online activities across websites and services. Some analytics providers offer you choices about how they collect and use data directly on their websites.

Advertising Cookies — “Advertising cookies” use info about your visit to our services and your use of them to deliver ads that are more relevant to you, both on and off our services. These types of ads are called “Interest-Based Advertising.” We sometimes work with third-party partners that set their own cookies or similar tracking technologies on our services to help them provide requested services on our or your behalf. For example, our advertising partners may use tracking technologies to help serve you ads better tailored to the interests you’ve shown by browsing our services (or by visiting other online services operated by third parties), determine whether you’ve seen a particular advertisement before (to prevent showing you duplicate ones), and for other lawful business purposes. Note that how third parties use tracking technologies falls under their own privacy policies, not ours.

Flash Cookies — “Flash Cookies”, also known as Local Shared Objects or “LSOs”, are used to store your preferences or display content based upon what you view on our services to personalize your visit. Flash Cookies are different from standard browser cookies because of the amount and type of data, and how data is stored.

As well as cookies other identification technologies may be use or permitted on our services. This may include one or more of the following listed below:

Pixel tags — “Pixel tags” (also called beacons or pixels) are small blocks of code installed on (or called by) a webpage, app, or ads which can retrieve certain info about your device and browser, including for example: device type, operating system, browser type and version, website visited, time of visit, referring website, IP address, and other similar info, including the small text file (the cookie) that uniquely identifies the device. Pixels provide the means by which third parties can set and read browser cookies from a domain that they do not themselves operate and collect info about visitors to that domain, typically with the permission of the domain owner.

Local storage — “Local storage” refers generally to other places on a browser or device where info can be stored by websites, ads, or third parties (such as HTML5 local storage and browser cache).

Software Development Kits — “Software Development Kits” (also called SDKs) function like pixels and cookies, but operate in the mobile app context where pixels and cookies cannot always function. The primary app developer can install pieces of code (the SDK) from partners in the app, and thereby allow the partner to collect certain info about your interaction with the app and info about your device and network.

IP address — “IP address” is the short form for Internet Protocol address, which is assigned by Internet Access Providers to every computer that is connected to the Internet. Website owners have access to IP addresses of their users. By IP addresses website owners can identify the country, state, and city from which a computer is connecting to the Internet. IP addresses are inter alia used for "IP geolocation" purposes, e.g. by Google Analytics.

Cookies may be placed on your device by us as the operator of our services. These cookies are called “first party” Cookies. Some cookies may however be placed on your device by a party other than us. These cookies are called “third party” cookies. Therefore some cookies that have been set on our services are not related to us. When you visit our service with content embedded from, say Google’s DoubleClick, these partners may set their own cookies on your web browser. They remember that you have visited our services and this info is shared with other organizations such as advertisers. Often targeting or advertising cookies will be linked to site functionality provided by the other organization.

Where the relevant service has the Cookie Consent Tool incorporated, you can use it to refuse or accept cookies from our services at any time.

You can also find info about how to enable or disable cookies on your Internet browser provider’s website via your help screen or refer to http://www.allaboutcookies.org for info on commonly used browsers. If you want to clear all cookies left behind by online services including our services you have visited, here are links where you can download programs that clean out tracking cookies: Lavasoft and Spybot.

Cookie management tools provided by your browser will not remove Flash Cookies. To learn how to manage privacy and storage settings for Flash Cookies, please consult the instructions provided by Adobe here.

We do not control third party cookies and cannot access them due to the way that cookies work, as cookies can only be accessed by the party who originally set them. You should check the third party websites for more info about these cookies.

If you don’t want to take advantage of the services that such tracking technologies provide, you may be able to opt-out by visiting http://youronlinechoices.eu.

Please be aware that if cookies are disabled, not all features of our services may operate as intended.

To learn more about opting out of Google Analytics, which uses cookies as well as your IP address, click here.

We may update our policy from time to time to reflect changes in technology, legislation, our operations, or as we otherwise determine is necessary or appropriate. Any such changes will become effective when we make the revised policy available on or through our services. We encourage you to review the “Effective Date” legend frequently to ensure you are aware of when our policy was last revised, and to help you better understand the nature of your interactions with our services.