Thursday, May 24, 2012

Cookies or no cookies?

Cookies or no Cookies?

What is a Cookie?
Cookies are small files placed on your computer, tablet or mobile device by a website or mobile app. The cookie has a unique ID assigned to your device, but does not contain any of your personal information like name or email address. It helps to navigate from page to page on a website, provide secure connections, and remembers preferences from a previous visit, when you return.

Per Directive 2009/136/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council, companies may require a visitor to their sites to explicitly provide their choice reqarding the use of cookies on that site. Providing explicit choice is driven by the implementation of this directive in each EU country. While compliance is directed to residents of the specific EU country, any visitor to the company's sites will need to respond to the cookie prompt.


Cookies On Our Websites:
Operational cookies: 
Websites use cookies to provide services that you request on their websites. These services include user log-in, managing the items in your Shopping Carts, setting language preferences and security protection. These are essential to the operation of the site.

Non-Operational Cookies / Web Beacons 
Companies also use cookies to provide other services or to help improve their products and services. This includes giving you the opportunity to provide ratings and reviews about our products and services, order free samples and print money-off coupons, link to Social Media sites, and setting controls for audio and video players. Information is tailored to you based on your preferences.
Some cookies provide us statistics about the number of visitors and the web pages viewed. This information helps us to design better content for you. You may refuse cookies, but this may limit your usability of the site and reduces our ability to improve our products and services and provide engaging content.

Managing cookies via your web browser:
Your web browser has settings that let you manage which cookies can be dropped onto your computer. To learn more about the settings, click on the link for your browser.

List of key browsers

Apple Safari: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Safari/3.0/en/9277.html
Google Chrome: http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=95647
Microsoft Internet Explorer: http://www.microsoft.com/info/cookies.mspx
Mozilla Firefox: http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Enabling%20and%20disabling%20cookies
All About Cookies – More information can be found at All About Cookies: http://www.allaboutcookies.org/cookies/