Cookies

The Company uses cookies to keep our sites reliable, secure and personalised. When you accept cookies, this helps make the site better by remembering your preferences, customising content or ads, and enhancing your experience of our premium news, insight and analysis.

This Policy applies to all websites and web applications which link to this policy and are published by Company (“Sites”).

This Policy should be read alongside our Privacy Statement, which explains how we use personal information.

If you wish to manage your cookies, please follow the instructions in the “How to manage cookies” section below.

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What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files which a website may place on your computer or device when you visit a site. The cookie will help the website, or another website, to recognise your device the next time you visit. Web beacons, pixels or other similar files can also do the same thing. We use the term “cookies” in this policy to refer to all files that collect information in this way.

Cookies serve many functions. For example, they can help us to remember your username and preferences, analyse how well our Sites are performing, or allow us to recommend content we believe will be most relevant to you.

The majority of websites use cookies to collect and retain personal information about their visitors. Most cookies collect general information, such as how visitors arrive at and use our Sites, the device they are using, their internet protocol address (IP address), what pages they are viewing and their approximate location (for example, we would be able to recognise that you are visiting our Sites from Texas).

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Purpose of cookies

We group our cookies into the below categories.

Operating our Sites

Some cookies are essential for the operation of our Sites. This includes cookies for the following purposes:

• Access – we use these cookies to identify subscribers and ensure access to subscription only pages, including premium access.
• Billing – if your subscription is provided by your employer or educational institution under a group subscription, we use cookies for the purposes of measuring activity and billing.
• Performance – we use these cookies to monitor Site performance. This allows us to provide a high quality experience by quickly identifying and fixing any issues that arise. For example, we might use performance cookies to track error messages, and to determine improvements to our Sites.
• Functionality – we use functionality cookies to allow us to remember your preferences. For example, we use functionality cookies to provide you with enhanced services, such as allowing you to watch a video online or comment on a blog.
• Analytics – we use cookies to help us understand our audience and the success of advertising campaigns. For example, we count articles views to present ‘Most Read’ content. We also use analytics cookies to keep track of how many advertising impressions have been served for a campaign and to manage the frequency at which you see the same adverts.
• Fraud prevention – we use cookies to monitor and prevent suspicious activity and fraudulent traffic.

Personalisation 

We use cookies to improve your experience of our products by personalising our Sites. For example, we help you to find new content and recommend email alerts based on the topics you read. Where our Sites have such functionality, you can manage elements of personalisation in your account.

Advertising

We use cookies to serve you with advertisements that we believe are relevant to you and your interests. You may see these advertisements on our Sites and on other sites that you visit. You may also see advertisements for our products and services on other websites if you have previously visited our Sites.   

For our Sites that offer behaviourally or demographically targeted advertising, you will have the opportunity to turn this off in your account. Please note, if you turn this off you will still see the same number of advertisements but they may be less relevant to you. You may continue to see “contextual” advertisements that are not targeted based on your personal information – for example, a motoring advertisement presented on a motoring article.

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Third party cookies on our Sites

We also use third party cookies on our Sites that fall into the categories above (“third party cookies”) for the following reasons:

• to help us monitor traffic on our Sites (like many companies, we use Google Analytics to do this);
• to identify fraudulent or non-human traffic;
• to assist with market research;
• to improve Site functionality;
• to monitor compliance with our terms and conditions and copyright policy.

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Our standard advertising terms and conditions do not permit our advertisers to drop their own cookies for profiling or retargeting without your consent.

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How to manage cookies?

You can manage your cookies by specific browser settings.

There are typical guidelines for managing those:

• Safari
• Chrome
• Edge
• Opera

You can search for specific cookie settings if you use a different system.

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Use of pixels in emails

Our emails often contain a single, campaign-unique “web beacon pixel” to tell us whether, and how many times, our emails are opened and verify any clicks through to links or advertisements within the email. We use this information for purposes including:

• Determining which of our emails are more interesting to users;
• Determining users’ activity and engagement with our products and services;
• Informing our advertisers (in aggregate) how many users have clicked on their advertisements.

The pixel will be deleted when you delete the email. If you do not wish the pixel to be downloaded to your device, you should select to receive emails from us in plain text rather than HTML via your email provider settings.

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More information

Further information about our data processing can be found in our Privacy Statement.