Privacy policy

This Policy covers our use of cookies, IP addresses, and other technologies.

What are Cookies?

Cookies and other online tracking technologies are small bits of data or code that are used to identify your devices when you use and interact with our websites and other services. They are often used for remembering your preferences, to identify popular news stories, and remember you’re logged in, allowing you to comment on stories.

What Cookies do we use and how do we use them?

Essential cookies and similar technologies

These are vital for the running of our services on our websites. Without the use of these cookies parts of our websites would not function. For example, it uses cookies to help us identify which of our readers are registered. We use these cookies to tell if you’re logged in to your account, which allows extra functionality, such as writing articles.

Analytics cookies and similar technologies

These collect information about your use of our websites, and enable us to improve the way it works. For example, analytics cookies show us which are the most frequently visited pages  allowing us to provide most relevant articles or services. They help us record how you interact with our websites, such as how you navigate around pages and from page to page; identifying improvements we can make to the customer journey. They also help identify any difficulties you have accessing our services, so we can fix any problems. Additionally these cookies allow us to see overall patterns of usage at an aggregated level.

Functional/preference cookies and similar technologies

These cookies collect information about your choices and preferences, and allow us to remember things like language, your username (so you can log in faster), text size, and location, so we can show you relevant content to where you are. They allow us to customize the services you have accessed. We also use these cookies to provide you with services such as video clips.

Tracking URLs

Tracking URLs are a special web link that allows us to measure when a link is clicked on. They are used to help us measure the effectiveness of campaigns and advertising and the popularity of articles that are read.

We also use cookies and similar technologies:

When you access and interact with our services cookies may collect certain information about those visits. For example, in order to permit your connection to our websites, our servers receive and record information about your computer, device, and browser, including potentially your IP address, browser type, other software or hardware information, and your geographic location.

If you access our services from a mobile device

We may collect a unique device identifier assigned to that device, geo-location data, and other transactional information for that device. We may also use the unique identifier to validate free trials, for example.

Usage of services

To collect, use and store information about your usage of our services, websites, such as pages you have visited, content you have viewed, search queries you have run, and information you have seen or interacted with.

To provide relevant content

The content on our websites and in our communications with you may be adjusted depending on what we know about the content, products and services that you like. This means we can highlight content and articles that we believe will be of interest to you. We may provide personalisation by using cookies, IP addresses, web beacons, URL tracking and mobile app settings.