In order to offer a well-managed and effective website, we record and store and store a small amount of information about your activities on the site in the form of cookies and web logs. Some of this data is stored on your computer, some on our servers, and some is passed to essential 3rd parties. These are explained below.
Cookies
Cookies are small files of data which our website and one of our service providers – Google – may store on your computer from time to time. These files contain anonymous, non-sensitive information which helps us and Google to group your activity on our site so that we can analyse and understand how our customers use our site. This information may include such things as:
- your geographical location (to the nearest city)
- the technology you are using to access our site (platform, operating system and web browser)
- whether you came to us from a search engine or from a link on another site
- which pages you viewed on our site, in which order, and for how long.
This information may also be stored on Google’s servers, so that they can separately provide us with this analysis, and their analysis is also available to our trusted website service provider.
The information cannot be used to identify you personally and neither we nor Google share it with anyone else. We only use this data to manage an effective and informative website. We do not use it for general marketing or any other commercial purpose.
If you do not want us to store cookies on your computer you have three choices:
- You can set your web browser to not store cookies, either for any site, or four our site specifically. Information on how to do this is readily available on the Internet.
- You can manually delete cookies using the facilities your web browser makes available to you to do so.
- You can choose not to visit our site.
Web logs
Like all web sites around the world, our web site runs on a web server which receives and processes requests from your web browser to display our web site to you. In order continue to do this effectively and securely it is necessary to create logs of these requests. These logs typically contain information such as:
- Your IP address, a unique numerical code which is provided by your Internet Service Provider to identify your computer, your business or domestic internet connection, or an intermediary service if relevant, so that our web server knows where to send the information it has been asked to send.
- The technology platform, software and browser making the request
- Where relevant, the address of the web page containing the link you clicked to make the request (i.e., unless you typed in the address directly)
- Whether or not the request resulted in a successful response, or in the case of an error, what that error was.
This information is essential to the effective delivery of web site services and in particular to the monitoring and mitigation of security threats. It is only available to staff of Baldersons, and to selected trusted website service providers who are contractually required to maintain its security and confidentiality on our behalf.
Under some circumstances it may be possible to identify you individually from your IP address; for example when it is permanently tied to a domestic or business property (known as a static IP address). As a result you have a number of rights relating to this data under our privacy policy.