When you use our sites we may collect information using cookies or similar technologies. For more information about the use of cookies while visiting our sites, please email [email protected] - subject line 'Cookies Policy'
What Are Cookies?
Cookies are small files that are downloaded and placed on your computer or mobile device when you visit a site. Your browser sends these cookies back to the site every time you visit the site again, so it can recognize you. This allows sites to tailor what you see on the screen. When you visit our sites, we may collect information from you automatically through cookies or similar technology.
What Do Cookies Do?
Cookies help to make the interaction between users and sites faster and easier. What cookies don't do is store any personal or confidential information about you. Cookies aren't used to identify you personally but they can remember activities and preferences chosen by you and your browser. They're here to make the sites work better for you, and to help us understand how people use the sites.
What Do We Use Cookies For?
Cookies and other online tracking technologies are an important part of the internet. They make using sites much smoother and affect lots of the useful features of sites.
There are many different uses for cookies, but for within our sites, they fall into the following groups:
(i) Cookies that are needed to provide the service you have asked for (Essential)
Some cookies are essential so you can move around our sites and use their features. Without the use of these cookies parts of our sites would not function.
(ii) Cookies that collect information about your choices and preferences (Functional / Preference)
These cookies collect information about your choices and preferences, and allow us to remember things like:
(iii) Cookies used to understand how people use our products and services (Analytics)
We use analytics cookies to gather information about what pages, links and sections of our sites that are popular and which ones don't get used so much to help us keep our sites relevant and up to date. They are also useful to be able to identify trends of how people navigate our sites so we can identify improvements to make to the customer journey
We may combine information collected by analytics cookies with other information that you provide to us. For instance, if you have registered for an account with us, we may combine your contact details other information you provide us with the browsing history from your device collected by analytics cookies (including data collected from before you registered and when you are signed-out).
We may also use this combined information to improve our products and services. For instance, we may analyse this information in aggregate to improve our advertising systems.
(iv) Cookies used to show advertising that is relevant to you (Tracking and Advertising)
Some advertising, known as “online behavioural advertising” is tailored to you and uses information collected by first party and third party cookies based your web browsing activity. Cookies are placed on your browser to remember the sites you have visited. Advertising based on what you have been looking at is then displayed to you when you visit sites who use the same advertising networks.
We also use these cookies in order to:
- know how many advertisements we serve, how many times these are clicked or hovered over with a mouse cursor, how many advertisements we show to a given user and how many customer actions these generate.
- understand which customers reach a sale or other action page on an advertiser’s site. This allows us to monitor how many sales or actions we achieve for an advertising client, and therefore, how effective our advertising is.
- protect our advertisers' brands, we often use a technology that scans the page to ascertain that it is safe from profane, sensitive & potentially brand-negative topics, before serving an ad there. This process is called “ad verification”.
Ad-blockers: We and our advertisers may use information from within our sites to determine whether you have an ad-blocker enabled. This information may be stored or associated with your device (including through the use of cookies) to re-insert advertisements on our sites and to understand how our customers use ad-blockers. The advertisements that are re-inserted may include those from ad-blockers’ “white lists” or that promote our own products and services. We reserve the right to restrict your access to some or all of our sites while you have an ad blocker turned on.
How Do We Use Cookies?
We use cookies in a range of ways to improve your experience on our site, including;
- Understanding how you use our site
- Showing you articles that are relevant to you
- Showing you products and services that are relevant to you
- Working with partners to serve you relevant advertising
Ultimately, this allows us to publish the articles that you read on our sites and apps.
Other organisations also collect user information on our sites through cookies, tags and pixels. Tags and pixels, also known as web beacons, are similar to cookies but are collected through embedded images.
Using cookies and other technology allows other organisations to help us to analyse how our site is being used, measure the number of visitors to the site, and display advertising.
Are Cookies Safe?
Yes, cookies are harmless text files. They can't look into your computer or read any personal information or other material on your hard drive. Cookies can't carry viruses or install anything harmful on your computer.
How Do I Manage Cookies?
Most web browsers allow you to control cookies through your browser settings. Please consult your user manual or online help guide for details on how to control cookies. To find out more about cookies and how to manage them, you may wish to visit www.allaboutcookies.org.
We advise you to keep cookies active during your visits to our sites because parts of the site rely on them to work properly.
You have a number of options when it comes to receiving cookies. You can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only 'trusted' sites to send them, or to accept only those cookies from sites you are currently using.
We recommend that you don't block all cookies because parts of our sites rely on them to work properly.
Please remember that if you wish to disable cookies you will need to do this each time you visit our sites.
Our Cookies Policy does not cover any third party sites that are linked. If you click through to these sites, they may set cookies on your computer. To understand which cookies are used by these companies and how they use your data, please read their privacy and cookies policies. We accept no responsibility or liability for these third party sites.
Cookies can also be controlled using the following instructions:
- Mobile Devices: When using a mobile device, you can opt-out of receiving online behavioural advertising by selecting ‘Limit Ad Tracking’ in the Settings of your Apple iPhone or iPad, or the “Opt out of interest-based ads” in the Settings on your Android device. You may also be able to reset your unique identifier used for online behavioural advertising (referred to as an “Advertising ID”) in the Settings on your Apple or Android device.
- OBA Cookies: If you are primarily concerned about third party cookies generated by advertisers, you can turn these off by going toYour Online Choices.
- Web-Beacons: You can usually prevent the operation of web-beacons by changing your web-browser cookie settings and your ad choices, or for those in emails, by switching off images in your email client or viewing emails using only the “text” display (rather than “HTML” display”). See the “Help” section of your email client for instructions. Please see theAll About Cookies site for further information about managing your options.
- Flash Cookies: You can manage the use of Flash technologies with the Flash management tools available at Adobe’s site.
- You can also visit the trade body representing these advertising platforms where you can control your third-party online advertising preferences by going to the Network Advertising Initiative.
- Browsers: The links below take you to the help sections for each of the major browsers that will tell you how you can manage your cookies:
- - Firefox
- - Internet explorer
- - Chrome
- - Safari OS X
- - Safari iOS
- - Android
- - Blackberry
- - Windows phone
Please note that our sites and other products and services may not work correctly (or at all) if you change certain preferences. For example, you may not be able to purchase products via our sites.
Where you use our apps, similar technologies to cookies are used for analytics. It is not presently possible to opt-out of these similar technologies. If you are not happy to be included in our analysis, please do not use our apps.
Please also note that after applying these settings, you will continue to receive advertising, however, it may not be tailored to your likely interests using information collected from cookies and similar technologies on your device.
What Types Of Cookies Do We Use?
We use four types of cookies, which we describe in this section.
- Essential – cookies that are essential to provide you with services you have requested.
- Performance - cookies which measure how often you visit our sites and how you use them. For example, we collect information about which of our pages are most frequently visited, and by which types of users. We also use third-party cookies to help with performance. For example, the Google Analytics cookie gives us information such as your journey between pages.
- Functionality – cookies that are used to recognise you and remember your preferences or settings when you return to our site, so that we can provide you with a more personalised experience.
- Advertising – cookies that are used to collect information about your visit to our site, the content you have viewed, the links you have followed and information about your browser, device and your IP address
White Scribbles Uses The Following Key Partners
As you browse our site, some of the cookies and similar technology we place on your device are for advertising, so we can understand what sorts of pages you read and are interested in. We can then display advertising on your browser based on these interests. For instance, if you have been reading a lot of health articles, you may be shown more adverts based on health.
The advertising techniques we use do not collect information such as your name, email address, postal address or phone number. We sometimes use information such as your IP address and browser type and also sometimes share some limited aspects of this with third parties for advertising purposes.
We may also share online data collected through cookies and similar technology with our advertising partners. This means that when you are on another site, you may be shown advertising based on your browsing patterns on whitescribbles.com. We may also show you advertising on whitescribbles.com site based on your browsing patterns on other sites that we have obtained from our advertising partners.
For example, if you have visited the site of an online clothes shop, you may start seeing adverts from that same shopping site displaying special offers or showing you the products you were browsing. This allows companies to advertise to you if you leave their site without making a purchase.
We carefully select a number of third party companies to help us serve you better.
Useful links
If you would like to find out more about privacy, cookies and their use on the internet, you may find the following links useful:
Updated to reflect changes resulting from the General Data Protection Regulation. – effective date 27 July 2018.