Cookie Policy

We use cookies to improve the user’s experience of the website and to gather information about the use of the site. No personal information is being collected.

What’s a cookie?

A cookie is a small text file received and stored by your browser. Information in the cookie makes it possible for a website to recognise a specific browser installation and thus to send individualised information to this installation.

A cookie can contain text, numbers, dates etc. but it does not hold any personal information. A cookie is not a program and it cannot contain virus.

How to avoid cookies

If you do not wish to receive cookies, you can setup your browser so as to block all cookies, delete existing cookies from your computer’s hard disk drive or issue a warning before any new cookie is downloaded. Please consult your web browsers help function for instructions on how to do this.

What’s the lifetime of a cookie?

A cookie’s lifetime varies depending on the purpose for which they have been created. Some cookies disappear as soon as the browser is being shut down (temporary cookies) while others can live on for several months (permanent cookies). Many providers specify a 12 or 24 months lifetime on advertisement, statistics and contents related cookies.

Cookies with a specified lifetime will have a new expiration date set each time the site to which a cookie is related is revisited.

You can always force immediate deletion of the cookies on your computer. Please consult the web browsers help function for instructions on how to do this.

Cookies used on this website

We make a distinction between cookies sent by our website, (first party cookies) and those sent by the web-site of one of our partners, e.g. Google Analytics (third party cookies). In most browsers it is possible to define settings that control the acceptance of cookies on the computer.

If you wish to restrict or block web browser cookies which are set on your device then you can do this through your browser settings; the Help function within your browser should tell you how. Alternatively, you may wish to visit www.aboutcookies.org, which contains comprehensive information on how to do this on a wide variety of desktop browsers.

Third party cookies

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics uses cookies to gather statistics about our website, e.g. the number of visits, the number of clicks, time spent on the website etc. Google Analytics deposits the following third party cookies at our website:

– utma cookie

This is a permanent cookie use to track the number of visits to the website, date first visited and date last visited. The cookie does not make user identification possible.

– utmb and utmc cookies

These are temporary cookies. These two cookies form a pair, which is used to calculate time spent on the website. _utmb expires when a session ends, while _utmc lives on for 30 minutes after the session has ended. A cookie has no information about when you actually leave a website or shuts down the web browser. Therefore, it waits 30 minutes to see if further pages are being shown before declaring a session ended.

– utmz cookie

This cookie typically lives for 12 hours. The cookie tracks the origin of the visitor, e.g. which search engine was used and what search criteria was used.

2. Twitter

Twitter cookies are introduced by the Twitter follow button. For more information visit http://twitter.com/privacy

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn cookies are introduced by the Linkedin follow button: __qca, bcookie, X-LI-IDC, visit, NSC_MC_WT_FU_IUUQ. They are used to track which pages the user visits to collect them. For more information visit http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=privacy_policy

Links to other websites

Our website may contain links to other websites of interest. However, once you have used these links to leave our site, you should note that we do not have any control over that other website. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information which you provide whilst visiting such sites and such sites are not governed by this privacy statement. You should exercise caution and look at the privacy statement applicable to the website in question.