What are cookies?
Cookies are small text files that are stored on your computer or mobile device by websites you visit, which contain basic information such as user preferences. For more information visit www.allaboutcookies.org
Why are cookies used?
Cookies are widely used and have multiple uses such as for tracking visitor activity, to help improve the quality of content and website experience, remembering browsing preferences, serving personalised data and displaying essential website features.
What are the security and privacy issues?
A cookie can only be read by the server that set it, and cannot be executed as code or deliver viruses.
By exploiting websites with faulty server cookie settings it can be possible to intercept data as it’s transferred and as such would be deemed a clear breach of the Data protection act.
Although the majority of cookies are used for legitimate purposes there have been malicious attempts to exploit data security, for which this new cookie law has been introduced.
- Analytical purposes - measuring visitor behaviour so we can improve our website
- Your preferences - to remember the way you like to view our website
First Party Cookies
These are cookies set by the domain of the website you are visiting.
Used to detect if the cookie law notice has been displayed already.
Used by PHP, the programming language this website is built in, to retain information on the current user session. This cookie is deleted when a user closes their browser.
Used by OmCore’s load balancing server to determine the current application server in use.
Third Party Cookies
These cookies are set by a domain different to the website you are visiting, such as cookies set by Twitter or Facebook through social buttons on the page.
__utma to __utmz
These cookies are used by Google Analytics to collect information about how visitors use our site, helping us to improve it. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the site, where visitors have come to the site from and the pages they visited.
Our website uses a widget from ShareThis used to share pages/links from this website across various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. The cookie monitors "click-stream" activity, e.g. web pages viewed, navigation from page to page, time spent on each page etc. The ShareThis service only personally identifies you if you have separately signed up for a ShareThis account and given them your consent.
phpbb3_bristol_k, phpbb3_bristol_sid & phpbb3_bristol_u, style_cookie
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE, use_hitbox, GPS & PREF
We use YouTube to embed a selection of videos. The embedded videos do not set cookies themselves and can be played with no cookies set. However, if the ‘Share’ button is clicked YouTube will set these two cookies. The VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE cookie attempts to estimate your bandwidth and the use_hitbox cookie increments the ‘views’ counter on the YouTube video. These cookies don’t gather information that identifies a user.
We hope you find this content useful. Please remember that it’s intended as general information only. It’s not legal advice.