COOKIES POLICY
The Autism Directory
What are cookies?
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work better, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site. A cookie often contains a unique number, which can be used to recognise your computer when a user of your computer returns to a website that it visited previously.
How does The Autism Directory use cookies?
We use cookies to enhance the online experience of our visitors, to better understand how our websites are used and to monitor how our advertisements perform. Cookies may tell us, for example, whether you have visited our site before or whether you are a new visitor.
Your rights
Our cookies do not store financial information or information which is capable of directly identifying you (such as your name or address). You have the right to choose whether to accept these cookies. You can exercise this right by amending or setting the controls on your browser to reflect your cookie preferences. However, please note that if you choose to refuse cookies you may not be able to use the full functionality of our websites.
Changing your cookie preferences
The "Help" menu in the toolbar of most web browsers will tell you how to change your browser's cookie settings, including how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, and how to disable cookies altogether. An online guide is availableif you have difficulties trying to change your browser settings.
Cookie Terminology
We have classified our cookies into two broad types - 'first party cookies' and 'third party cookies':
- First party cookies are cookies that are served directly by the website operator to your computer, and are often used to recognise your computer when it revisits that site and to remember your preferences as you browse the site.
- Third party cookies are served by a service provider on behalf of the website operator, and can be used by the service provider to recognise your computer when it visits other web sites. Third party cookies are used for a variety of reasons, most commonly used for website analytics or advertising purposes. More details are provided in the third party cookie section.
In addition, cookies may be either 'session cookies' or 'persistent cookies'. Your computer automatically removes session cookies once you close your browser. Persistent cookies will survive on your computer until an expiry date specified in the cookie itself, is reached.
List of the main cookies used on our website
To help you understand how we use cookies, this is a list of the main cookies set across our website and what each is used for:
Third party cookies
We work with a number of third party suppliers who set cookies on our website to enable them to provide us with services. These cookies are mainly used for reporting and advertising purposes so that we can improve the way we communicate with our supporters and ensure the money we invest in online advertising is well spent. More information about the main suppliers we use and their privacy policies is listed below.
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Cookie name |
Description and privacy policy |
Cookie name(s) |
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DoubleClick |
We use DoubleClick cookies to measure the effectiveness of our online advertising. This enables us to ensure that any money we spend on digital marketing gives us a good return on investment. DoubleClick cookies do two things: 1) they track anonymised conversion data so that we can measure advertising effectiveness and 2) they are used to serve advertising, enabling us to serve advertisements to or exclude people who have visited our website. The cookies also allows us to limit the number of times a person sees our advertisement. DoubleClick cookies sometimes include a pixel from the advertising networks we work with. This allows us to target adverts effectively on their networks. DoubleClick privacy policy (link is external) |
_gads |
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Google Analytics |
Google Analytics is a web analytics service provided by Google inc. that enables us to measure how people use our website using cookies. We use this information to improve our website experience for website visitors and to measure the effectiveness of our online advertising. We can also use these cookies to serve relevant advertisements to people who have interacted with specific sections of the site, or to exclude those audiences from advertising. For those site visitors who have explicitly opted in to Google’s data privacy policy, Google will associate your IP address with other data held by Google in order to identify you across multiple devices. You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser. You may also stop the transmission of information generated by the cookies about your use of the website and of your IP address to Google, by downloading and installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Broswer Add-on available here https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout Google Analytics privacy policy (links are external) |
__ga, __gid, __gat |
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Facebook is a social media platform we use to communicate with our supporters through both unpaid posts and paid advertising. We use cookies to measure the effectiveness of paid advertising on Facebook to ensure the money we spend is used effectively. They also enable us to either service advertisements to or excluse people who have visited our website. Facebook privacy policy (link is external) |
Fr |
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PHPSESSID
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To store a simple message when a form is submitted that can be displayed on a different page. For example, if an enquiry form is completed incorrectly, a message will be stored and presented to the user to indicate the errors in the submission. When an enquiry form is submitted successfully, a message is stored and presented to the user thanking them for their enquiry. No personal information is stored in this cookie. |
PHPSESSID
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PHPSESSID
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To store a the logged in user's username and a 128bit encrypted key. This information is required to allow a user to stay logged in to a web site without needing to submit their username and password for each page visited. Without this cookie, a user is unable to proceed to areas of the web site that require authenticated access. |
PHPSESSID
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CloudFlare |
DNS records held at CloudFlare enable us to provide a secure connection; they set this cookie to identify your device as trusted.
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__cfduid |
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Youtube |
Used for YouTube Bandwidth Measurement, also used to deliver adverts more relevant to you and your interests. They are also used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement as well as help measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. Also used for storing user preferences and other unspecified purposes
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VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE, PREF YSC, GPS
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Cookies set by third parties
If you go on to a page on our website that contains embedded content, for example YouTube, you may be sent cookies from these websites.
Our website also contains embedded “share” buttons to enable users of the site to easily share articles with their friends through a number of popular networks, for example, Facebook and Twitter. These sites may set a cookie when you are also logged in to their service.
We do not control the setting of these cookies, so we suggest you check the third party website for more information about their cookies and how to manage them.
Additional References
Further information about cookies and how to control their use is available from All About Cookies(link is external) and Your Online Choices(link is external)