Cookies

How we use cookies

We use cookies and similar tools across our websites to improve their performance and enhance your user experience. This policy explains how we do that.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files which a website may put on your computer or mobile device when you first visit a site or page. The cookie will help the website, or another website, to recognise your device the next time you visit. Web beacons or other similar files can also do the same thing. We use the term “cookies” in this policy to refer to all files that collect information in this way.

There are many functions cookies serve. For example, they can help us to remember your username and preferences, analyse how well our website is performing, or even allow us to recommend content we believe will be most relevant to you.

Certain cookies contain personal information – for example, if you click to “remember me” when logging in, a cookie will store your username. Most cookies won’t collect information that identifies you, and will instead collect more general information such as how users arrive at and use our websites, or a user’s general location.

What sort of cookies do you use?
Generally, our cookies perform up to three different functions:

1. Essential cookies
Some cookies are essential for the operation of our website. For example, some cookies allow us to identify subscribers and ensure they can access the subscription only pages. If a subscriber opts to disable these cookies, the user will not be able to access all of the content that a subscription entitles them to.

2. Performance Cookies
We utilise other cookies to analyse how our visitors use our websites and to monitor website performance. This allows us to provide a high quality experience by customising our offering and quickly identifying and fixing any issues that arise. For example, we might use performance cookies to keep track of which pages are most popular, which method of linking between pages is most effective, and to determine why some pages are receiving error messages. We might also use these cookies to highlight articles or site services that we think will be of interest to you based on your usage of the website.

3. Functionality Cookies
We use functionality cookies to allow us to remember your preferences. For example, cookies save you the trouble of typing in your username every time you access the site, and recall your customisation preferences, such as which regional edition of the website you want to see when you log in.

We also use functionality cookies to provide you with enhanced services such as allowing you to watch a video online or comment on a blog.

We also use or allow third parties to serve cookies that fall into the four categories above. For example, like many companies, we use Google Analytics to help us monitor our website traffic.

We may also use third party cookies to help us with market research, revenue tracking, improving site functionality and monitoring compliance with our terms and conditions and copyright policy.