Cookies Policy

First Party Cookies

First party cookies are set by the website you are visiting and they can only be read by that site.

Third Party Cookies

Third party cookies are set by other organisations that we use for different services. For example, JONATHAN CHARLES uses external analytics services and these suppliers may set cookies on our behalf in order to report what’s popular and what’s not. The website you are visiting may also contain content embedded from, for example, YouTube and these sites may set their own cookies.

Session Cookies

Session Cookies are stored only for the duration of your visit to a website and these are deleted from your device when your browsing session ends.

Persistent Cookies

This type of cookie is saved on your device for a fixed period. Persistent cookies are used where we need to know who you are for more than one usage session. For example, if you have asked us to remember preferences like your location or your username.

Flash cookies

Many websites use Adobe Flash Player to deliver video and game content to their users. Adobe utilise their own cookies, which are not manageable through your browser settings but are used by the Flash Player for similar purposes, such as storing preferences or tracking users.

Flash Cookies work in a different way to web browser cookies; rather than having individual cookies for particular jobs, a website is restricted to storing all data in one cookie. You can control how much data, if any, may be stored in that cookie but you cannot choose what type of information is allowed to be stored. You can manage which websites can store information in Flash cookies on your device via the website storage settings panel on the Adobe website.

Web beacons, clear GIFs, page tags and web bugs

These are all terms used to describe a particular form of technology implemented by many websites in order to help them to analyse how their site is being used and, in turn, to improve your experience of their site. They may also be used to target any advertising being served on the web page you are viewing.

A web beacon (or similar) usually takes the form of a small, transparent image, which is embedded in a web page or an email. They are used in conjunction with cookies and send information such as your IP address, when you viewed the page or email, from what device and your (broad) location.

Cookies enable us to identify your device, or you when you have logged in. We use cookies that are strictly necessary to enable you to move around the site or to provide certain basic features. We use cookies to enhance the functionality of the website by storing your preferences, for example. We also use cookies to help us to improve the performance of our website to provide you with a better user experience.

Typically, we use cookies to deliver the following services throughout the pages of our websites:

• To enable us to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information repeatedly;
• To recognise that you may have requested that we remember your username and password so you don’t need to enter your details each time you visit the site;
• To record what people like and don’t like on the website and the popularity of various elements of the website so that we can ensure that it works properly at points of high usage. JONATHAN CHARLES also uses a number of independent measurement, advertising and research companies. They gather information regarding the visitors to our sites on our behalf using cookies, log file data and code which is embedded on our website. Jonathan Charles uses this type of information to help improve the services it provides to its users.

Omniture (Visual Sciences) / Google Analytics provide anonymised statistical information for us. They process IP addresses and information from cookies used on our sites so we know how many page views we have, how many users we have, what browsers they are using (so we can target our resources in the right way to maximise compatibility for the majority of our users) and, in some cases, in which country, city or region they are located.

Importantly, this statistical information also allows us to determine how much we should charge for advertising, and if we are hitting our target audience. If we didn’t have these measurement tools to enable us to get our sums right on the advertising we would have less money to spend on improving our sites’ content. Some of the IP address and information from cookies gathered by these providers is processed by them outside the European Economic Area (e.g. Omniture (Visual Sciences) processes data in the United States and we confirm that it satisfies the EU’s data protection requirements).

Behavioural Marketing technology gives users and advertisers a more valuable and unique experience by delivering advertising and content that is more relevant to the user.

The system we are using is a type of “onsite behavioural marketing” which uses cookies to discover general information about which pages on our sites you visit. It also looks at IP addresses to add general information about the country, city or region in which you are located, along with your domain name (e.g. what internet service provider you use). This information enables you to be grouped with other people of similar interests and places you in a “market segment”.

We use several third parties to provide these services. They drop cookies on our behalf to allow us to deliver and measure the effectiveness of digital advertising. These providers only use the information above to create aggregated and anonymous profiles of who sees ads or who visits websites.

Save in respect of registered users who have already consented to be contacted to receive targeted marketing communications under the Privacy Policy, it is important to note that at no time will we or our service providers attempt to identify you individually, and at no time do we know who you are or what pages you individually have been looking at – we simply aggregate the relevant information to create the market segments of groups of people. We will at all times seek to comply with the regulatory framework applicable to onsite behavioural targeting technology in our implementation of it.

You can find out more about online behavioural advertising cookies and opt out of behavioural marketing by going to optout.networkadvertising.org.

On a quarterly basis, we conduct an audit of all cookies being used across the website portfolio.

Please email [email protected] if you would like more information on the cookies that we use and their purposes.