European Union’s Cookie Law
European laws require that digital publishers give visitors to their sites and apps information about their use of cookies and other forms of local storage. In many cases these laws also require that consent be obtained.
The Cookie Law is a piece of privacy legislation that requires websites to get consent from visitors to store or retrieve any information on a computer, smartphone or tablet. It was designed to protect online privacy, by making consumers aware of how information about them is collected and used online, and give them a choice to allow it or not.
It started as an EU Directive that was adopted by all EU countries in May 2011. The Directive gave individuals rights to refuse the use of cookies that reduce their online privacy. Each country then updated its own laws to comply. In the UK this meant an update to the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations.
What are cookies?
Cookies are pieces of data, normally stored in text files, that websites place on visitors’ computers to store a range of information, usually specific to that visitor – or rather the device they are using to view the site – like the browser or mobile phone.
They were created to overcome a limitation in web technology. Web pages are ‘stateless’ – which means that they have no memory, and cannot easily pass information between each other. So cookies provide a kind of memory for web pages.
Cookies allow you to login on one page, then move around to other pages and stay logged in. They allow you to set preferences for the display of a page, and for these to be remembered the next time you return to it.
Cookies can also be used to watch the pages you visit between sites, which allows advertisers to build up a picture of your interests. Then when you land on a site that shows one of their adverts – they can tailor it to those interests. This is known as ‘behavioural advertising’.
Almost all websites use cookies in some way or another, and every page you visit in those sites writes cookies to your computer and receives them back from it.
Cookies are incredibly useful – they allow modern websites to work the way people have come to expect – with every increasing levels of personalisation and rich interactive functionality.
However, they can also be used to manipulate your web experience in ways you might not expect, or like. It could be to your benefit, or the benefit of someone else – even a business or organisation that you have never had any direct contact with, or perhaps heard of.
It is impossible to tell just by looking at them, whether particular cookies are benefitting you or another party. You have to rely on the website you are visiting to tell you how it uses cookies.
Third party cookies
When visiting a web site you may receive cookies from visited site (first part), both sites run by other organizations (third parties). Notable examples are the presence of “embed”video or “social plugin” from social networking services. These are parts of the page visited generated directly from these sites and integrated into the site’s host page. The most common use is aimed at content sharing on social networks.
The presence of these plugins entails the transmission of cookies to and from all sites managed by third parties. The management of information collected by third parties is governed by their policies so please refer. To ensure greater transparency and convenience, We report below web addresses of several informative and procedures for managing cookies.
Also includes certain components from Google Analytics, a web traffic analysis provided by Google. Even in this case it is third party cookies collected and handled anonymously to monitor and improve the performance of the host site (cookie performance).
Google Analytics can gather and analyze anonymous information about usage patterns. This information is collected by Google Analytics, which processes them in order to draw up reports on the websites themselves. This site does not use (and does not allow third parties to use) the Google analytics tool to track or to collect personal identification information. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google nor tries to connect an IP address with the identity of a user. Google may also communicate this information to third parties where required to do so by law or where such third parties process the information on Google’s behalf.
How to change your cookie settings
Most browsers allows you to erase cookies from your computer hard drive, to block acceptance of cookies, or receive a warning before a cookie is stored.
How to change the settings for:
