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.
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:
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.
Anonymous 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 analytics programs also tell us if , on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics cookies: _utma, _utmb, _utmc, _utmz
- Purpose: To record how many people are using the website and how they move around the site once they’ve arrived:
- _utma tracks how many times (if any) you have visited the BIS website before.
- _utmb and _utmc are connected, and track how long you stay on the site.
- _utmz tracks identifies where you’ve come from e.g. from a search engine or from another website.
- Data stored by cookies: No personal information about you, just information about your computer and your browser.
- Duration of cookies:
- _utma: Expires 2 years after your last visit to this site.
- _utmb: Expires 30 minutes after your visit, or after 30 minutes of inactivity.
- _utmc: Expires when you close your browser.
- _utmz: Expires 6 months after it was last set.
- Google’s privacy policy
Remarketing Cookies
You may notice that sometimes after visiting a site you see increased numbers of adverts from the site you visited. This is because advertisers, including ourselves pay for these adverts. The technology to do this is made possible by cookies and as such we may place a so called remarketing cookie during your visit. We use these adverts to offer special offers etc to encourage you to come back to our site. Don’t worry we are unable to proactively reach out to you as the whole process is entirely anonymised.
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
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.
