Guernsey Press

Cookies And Third Party Privacy

This site uses cookies to customise and improve your experience. This page explains what cookies are, how we use them and how you can control them. What are cookies? 'Cookies' are small text files that are stored by the browser (e.g. Internet Explorer or Safari) on your computer or mobile phone. Websites are able to read and write these files, allowing them to store things such as user preferences. You can think of cookies as providing a "memory" for the website, enabling it to recognise a user and respond appropriately. Each web domain can only access cookies stored by that specific web domain, meaning that only our servers can access the cookies set our web site domain. Most web pages contain elements from multiple web domains. Therefore when you visit our web site, your browser may receive cookies from several sources. How will disabling cookies change my experience? Whilst it is important to be aware of the privacy implications of cookies, disabling cookies may negatively impact your online experience by preventing logging in, notifications and customisation. Specifically on our web site, comments, polls and surveys will no longer be fully usable and your site performance will be less optimised.

How does our web site use cookies? A visit to a page on our web site may generate the following types of cookie:

  • User feedback cookies
  • Site performance cookies
  • Anonymous analytics cookies
  • Social sharing cookies
  • Video players
  • Advertising cookies
  • Other third party cookies

User feedback cookies

If you submit a comment on our web site we use a cookie to show you that your comment is under moderation. This cookie is used for one page load and then removed. Occasionally we conduct polls on topics on our web site. We use a third party Apester to deliver our polls. Polldaddy provide their own privacy policy. If you vote using the Polldaddy component, one cookie is used to track that a vote has been cast. When completing a survey on our web site we may ask for contact information in order to request further information or deliver prizes. We will only contact you on other subjects if you check the corresponding consent fields. Wufoo also provide their own privacy policy.

Site performance cookies

One cookie is set by our network hardware to provide faster access times and more reliable sessions.

Anonymous analytics cookies

Web analytics software uses cookies to tell if you have visited the site before, determine how many unique users we have and how often they visit the site. These cookies cannot be used by us to identify individuals, they are used for aggregated statistics only. This allows us, for example, to tell which stories are the most popular and better optimise our content for the interests of our users. We use Google Analytics to provide our web analytics. Google have their own privacy policy with further information and an opt-out.

Social sharing cookies

To allow users to share our content with friends through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter we embed components provided by these third parties or build our own components which use their APIs. These third party companies have their own privacy policies (Twitter user privacy policy, Facebook user privacy policy) and also policies for publishers which we will comply with (Twitter API policy, Facebook developer policy). Outside of these standard social networks, users may copy and paste a section of a story for emailing to a friend along with a link to the article. We use a service called Tynt to provide us with aggregated analytics on this usage. Tynt have their own privacy policy and opt-out. To provide this service the Tynt product will set one cookie.

Video players

We deliver several different types of video to users of our web site, some appear in the content of stories, whilst others may appear on the homepage or in categories. Some video components may display video adverts from third parties which operate similarly to display advertising but may use flash cookies rather than traditional cookies. All of the video components we present use cookies for analytics purposes, similar to web analytics. YouTube privacy policies were recently consolidated into a global Google privacy policy.

Advert delivery system

Our display advert delivery system uses one cookie to identify which adverts you have seen previously and another set of cookies which all work to deliver campaigns effectively over a certain timeframe. For more information on the delivery system product from 247realmedia, visit their guide to Cookies in OAS.

Third party adverts

Many of the adverts you see on our web site are generated by third parties. Some of these third parties use their own anonymous cookies to track how many people have seen a particular ad, or to track how many people have seen it more than once. The companies that generate these cookies have their own privacy policies, and we have no access to read or write these cookies. These third party advertising cookies may be used by those third parties to anonymously target advertising to you on other websites, based on your visit to our web site. Other third party cookies Some components may be included other new third parties rarely or as a one off. These components will often be included to compliment a news story such as a live chat or timeline. When these components are supplied by third parties they may also set their own anonymous cookies, for the purposes of tracking the success of their application, or customising the application for you. Because of how cookies work, our web site cannot access these cookies, nor can the third parties access the data in cookies used by our web site. If any element is used frequently it will be added to this policy in more detail.

How do I turn cookies off?

It is usually possible to stop your browser accepting cookies, or to stop it accepting cookies from a particular website. However, you may find that some aspects of our web site stop working or work less well if you do this. (For example, we will no longer be able to show you that your comment is under moderation) All modern browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. These settings will typically be found in the 'options' or 'preferences' menu of your browser. In order to understand these settings, the following links may be helpful, otherwise you should use the 'Help' option in your browser for more details. We do not recommend turning cookies off when visiting our web site, as comments, polls and surveys will no longer be fully usable and your site performance will be less optimised. If you are primarily concerned about third party cookies generated by advertisers, you can turn these off by going to the Internet Advertising Bureau's (IAB) consumer site. You can also visit the trade body representing these advertising platforms for more information: Network Advertising Initiative. They also provide an opt-out for many advert networks.