WHAT ABOUT COOKIES: A “cookie” is a small text file stored on your computer by web sites you have visited. Cookies are used to provide the visitors of web sites access to different features and functionalities. The information contained in the cookie can be used to monitor the way you are using the Internet. According to the European Union’s e-privacy directive all of our visitors must have access to information which declare that this site is using cookies and describe the reason they are used. Visitors must also consent to the use of these cookies.
COOKIES: If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
THE FOLLOWING COOKIES ARE USED BY THIS SITE:
GOOGLE ANALYTICS: This web site makes use of the “Google Analytics” third party analytics tool to gather information about the way visitors use this site. The “Google Analytics” tool makes use of cookies to collect anonymous (aggregate) information about the way visitors use the site, such as the number of page views, how visitors reached our site and how many times they have visited our site. This information is used to improve our visitors’ experience using our web site. The information generated by your visit is collected by Alphabet Inc. (formerly Google Inc.).
Our site is using IP address anonymization for the “Google Analytics” tool. This means that the last octet of IPv4 IP addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses are replaced by zeroes before they are sent to and collected by the third party “Google Analytics” service. The replacement takes place in the memory of your web browser and is never stored on disk or transmitted over the network. Therefore your IP address is never recorded permanently as a result of our use of “Google Analytics”.
YOUTUBE: This web site makes use of the third party video streaming service “YouTube” to display videos, e.g. in the Videos section of our site. This site is using the “youtube-nocookies.com” domain name to display these videos. Per YouTube’s documentation this means that no cookies will be sent to your browser.
Please note that on some older browsers which use Adobe Flash (instead of native HTML 5 video) to stream video it is possible that a different kind of cookies, called “Flash cookies”, will be stored on your computer for purposes of allowing you to stream video and keep track of your video preferences e.g. closed captioning, position in the video, volume level etc.
We recommend that our visitors do NOT enable the Adobe Flash plugin on their browsers for reasons of privacy and security. All modern browsers support HTML5 video which is a safer alternative that does not rely on cookies to deliver video.
REMOVING COOKIES FROM YOUR DEVICE: You can delete all cookies that are already on your device by clearing the browsing history of your browser. This will remove all cookies from all websites you have visited.
Be aware though that you may also lose some saved information (e.g. saved login details, site preferences).
BLOCKING GOOKIES: You can set most modern browsers to prevent any cookies being placed on your device, but you may then have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit a site/page. And some services and functionalities may not work properly at all (e.g. profile logging-in).
To find out more out more on how to manage and delete cookies, visit allaboutcookies.org and/or wikipedia.org