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We use cookies to improve your experience on Sites and to recommend content that may be of interest to you.
You can indicate your acceptance to our use of cookies in accordance with this policy by clicking OK in the appropriate place on the banner that appears on the Sites or continuing to use the Sites after the banner has been shown. However, please note that if you do not click “OK but continue to browse the Sites, you will be deemed to have accepted our use of cookies (and what we use them for) in accordance with this Privacy Policy.
What are cookies?
Cookies are pieces of information that an Internet site transfers to your hard drive for record-keeping purposes. The use of cookies is an industry-standard - you'll find them almost everywhere on the Internet. Cookies are used to recognize visitors when they return to our sites. Once we know it's you, we can customize your online visit.
We may also evaluate our content and services and tailor our Sites for visitors based on other information we collect, such as IP addresses, which are numbers assigned to your computer whenever you use the Internet, pixel tags (or clear gifs), and the type of Internet browser or operating system you are using. This information is collected in the aggregate, but we may tie it to your Personal Information through cookie use as described above.
What cookies do we use?
When you visit the Sites, the following types of cookies may be downloaded to your device:
There are two types of cookies:
Persistent cookies remain on a user’s device for a set period of time specified in the cookie. They are activated each time that the user visits the website that created that particular cookie.
Session cookies are temporary. They allow website operators to link the actions of a user during a browser session. A browser session starts when a user opens the browser window and finishes when they close the browser window. Once you close the browser, all session cookies are deleted.
Cookies also have, broadly speaking, four different functions and can be categorized as follow: ‘strictly necessary’ cookies, ‘performance’ cookies, ‘functionality’ cookies and ‘targeting’ or ‘advertising’ cookies.
Strictly necessary cookies are essential to navigate around a website and use its features. Without them, you wouldn’t be able to use basic services like registration or shopping baskets. These cookies do not gather information about you that could be used for marketing or remembering where you’ve been on the internet.
Examples of how we use ‘strictly necessary’ cookies include:
- Setting unique identifiers for each unique visitor, so site numbers can be analyzed.
- Allowing you to sign in to The Independent website as a registered user.
Performance cookies collect data for statistical purposes on how visitors use a website; they don’t contain personal information such as names and email addresses, and are used to improve your user experience of a website.
Here are some examples of how we use performance cookies:
- Gathering data about visits to the website, including numbers of visitors and visits, length of time spent on the site, pages clicked on or where visitors have come from.
- For comparison with other websites using data collected by industry accepted measurement and research companies.
Information supplied by performance cookies helps us to understand how you use the website; for example, whether or not you have visited before, what you looked at or clicked on and how you found us. We can then use this data to help improve our services. We generally use independent analytics companies to perform these services for us and when this is the case, these cookies may be set by a third-party company (third party cookies).
If you have registered with the website, we can combine the data from the web analytics services and their cookies with the information you have supplied to us, so that we can make your experience more personal by recommending certain articles to you based on your reading behavior or tailoring your emails with content you might find more interesting. We would only do this if you have given us permission to communicate with you. Sometimes the data used from the web analytics companies has been collected before you registered or signed in. In these cases, if we use this data to identify you, we use it only in accordance with our privacy notice.
Functional cookies allow users to customize how a website looks for them: they can remember usernames, language preferences and regions, and can be used to provide more personal services like local weather reports and traffic news.
Here are some examples of how we use functionality cookies:
- Storing your user preferences on Your Account page
- Remembering if you’ve been to the site before so that messages intended for first-time users are not displayed to you.
Advertising and targeting cookies are used to deliver advertisements more relevant to you, but can also limit the number of times you see an advertisement, and be used to chart the effectiveness of an ad campaign by tracking users’ clicks. They can also provide security in transactions. They are usually placed by third-party advertising networks with a website operator’s permission, but can be placed by the operator themselves. They can remember that you have visited a website, and this information can be shared with other organizations, including other advertisers. They cannot determine who you are though, as the data collected is never linked to your profile.
The two main ways we use advertising and targeting cookies are set out below:
- Interest-based advertising (or online behavioral advertising) is where cookies are placed on your device by our third-party service providers which remember your web browsing activity and group together your interests in order to provide you with targeted advertisements which are more relevant to you when you visit Portonovi.com. Your previous web browsing activity can also be used to infer things about you, such as your demographics (age, gender etc.). This information may also be used to make the advertising on independent.co.uk more relevant to you. ‘Retargeting’ is a form of interest-based advertising that enables our advertising partners to show you advertisements selected based on your online browsing activity away from the website. This allows companies to advertise to people who previously visited their website. These cookies will usually be placed on your device by third-party advertising networks and we have listed the main third-party networks we work with below.
Without these cookies, online advertisements you encounter will be less relevant to you and your interests.
