Cookies and Privacy

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The EU Cookie Directive

The 'EU Cookie Directive' or 'Cookie Law' requires that we let you know about the use of cookies on this site and obtain your consent before setting any that are not considered 'essential' to the functioning of the site. Advice from the Information Commissioner's Office seems to suggest that the nature of our cookie use is such that 'implied consent' should suffice for our site to be compliant with the directive. What this means for us is that we must make a reasonable attempt to draw your attention to our use of cookies and give you enough information about them to help you to make an informed decision about whether you want to accept them, and that is where this page comes in. In continuing to use our site you are considered by implication to accept that we will attempt to set cookies and that you will take responsibility for blocking or removing them if you don't want them.

First party cookies

'First party' cookies are set directly by this web site and can only be accessed by this website. The domain of the cookie may be 'ecsosa.org.uk' or '.ecsosa.org.uk' depending on the origin of the cookie.

We don't deliberately set any cookies ourself but we also use Google Analytics on the site, and that sets a number of first party cookies (see below).

Third party cookies

'Third party' cookies are set by other websites and can only be accessed by those websites, and not by this one.

The 'share buttons' that appear under the menu on the left side of each page are provided by ShareThis. The '.sharethis.com' domain sets the two cookies __stid and __uset when displaying the buttons and __unam may appear the buttons are actively used. It is possible more third party cookies are set by ShareThis when sharing with particular services if there are things such as preferences to be saved. ShareThis uses Google Analytics when it is being actively used (see below).

We use Google Adsense advertising on this site to attempt to offset the costs of running the website.This results in two cookies to be set (id and _drt_) which are associated with the '.doubleclick.net' domain.

If you use the site search you will receive cookies from the '.google.co.uk' domain named NID and PREF.

Google Analytics

We have Google Analytics installed on this site, as do millions of other sites. With Google Analytics we can get a better understanding of how our website is used than the standard web logs give us, though 'can' is the important word as it isn't something we really do, we just have the information ready should we find a need for it. Google Analytics sets four first party cookies from '.ecsosa.org.uk' named __utma, __utmb, __utmc and __utmz. The first one is for uniquely identifying a visitor (which means a particular browser being used by a particular user account on a particular computer), the next two do session tracking, and the fourth provides information on how the page was reached (search engine, ad, direct link etc). Google Analytics is also used by ShareThis when the buttons are actively used. The cookies have the same names but are third party cookies from '.sharethis.com'.