Professional standards library

Cookies

What is a Cookie

A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is a piece of data stored by a website within a browser, and then subsequently sent back to the same website by the browser. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember things that a browser had done there in the past, which can include having clicked particular buttons, logging in, or having read pages on that site months or years ago.

NOTE : It does not know who you are or look at any of your personal files on your computer.

Why we use them

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, your computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.

These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:

recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested
measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are fast
analysing anonymised data to help us understand how people interact with our website so we can make them better

You can manage these small files and learn more about them from the article, Internet Browser cookies- what they are and how to manage them

Learn how to remove cookies set on your device

There are two types of cookie you may encounter when using our site :

First party cookies

These are our own cookies, controlled by us and used to provide information about usage of our site.

We use cookies in several places – we’ve listed each of them below with more details about why we use them and how long they will last.

Name	Purpose	Typical Content	Expires
blahCMS:CurrentLanguage	Its purpose is for our CMS to know what language you are viewing the site in.	Is usually a 4 digit number used to identify the current language in the CMS. Defaults 1804.
ASP.NET_SessionId	The ASP.NET session state is a technology that lets us identify different users of the site by a session ID.	Session IDs are a 120-bit random number that is represented by a 20-character string. The string is formatted so that it can be included in a URL and it does not have to undergo URL encoding.	On Session End.
whoson	Is a cookie put onto the system by the whoson client we install. It is used to track a user on a site in order to be able to use livechat so the admin can help a user on particular pages.	Stores a number to use as a Unique Identifier for a user currently online.

Third party cookies

These are cookies found in other companies’ internet tools which we are using to enhance our site, for example Facebook or Twitter have their own cookies, which are controlled by them.

We do not control the dissemination of these cookies. You should check the third party websites for more information about these.

Provider	Name	Purpose	More info
Google Analytics	_utma _utmb _utmc _utmz	These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our site. We use the information to compile reports and to help us improve the site. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the site, where visitors have come to the site from and the pages they visited.	Google Privacy policy
Add This	_utma _utmb _utmz _atuvc _utmc	Tracks what is being shared and by whom.	Add This Privacy Policy
YouTube	VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE	You Tube Plugin – embedding You Tube content	Google Policies and Principles
Facebook	datr lu	Facebook Social Plugin – embedding Facebook content	Facebook privacy policy
Google Map	NNID PREF	Google Plugin – embedding Google content	Google Privacy policy
Twitter	guest_id _twitter_sess twll	Twitter Social Plugin – embedding Twitter content	Twitter Privacy Policy
LinkedIn	PersistenceCookie JSESSIONID lang	LinkedIn Social Plugin – embedding LinkedIn content	LinkedIn Privacy Policy

Log files

Log files allow us to record visitors’ use of the site. The CMS puts together log file information from all our visitors, which we use to make improvements to the layout of the site and to the information in it, based on the way that visitors move around it. Log files do not contain any personal information about you. If you receive the HTML-formatted version of a newsletter, your opening of the newsletter email is notified to us and saved. Your clicks on links in the newsletter are also saved. These and the open statistics are used in aggregate form to give us an indication of the popularity of the content and to help us make decisions about future content and formatting.