What is a cookie?

A cookie is a small file, often encrypted, which allows a website to recognise a user’s device. It is typically made up of letters and numbers and is downloaded on to your device when you access a website.

Cookies are generally used to help users navigate websites more efficiently and perform certain functions. Since their core role is to enhance usability and improve processes, if you disable cookies you may find that our website does not perform as well as you would expect.

When you load a particular website, a cookie is created. Every time you then revisit that specific website, the browser retrieves and sends this file to the website’s server. Cookies are also being created by other websites when ads, plug-ins, widgets, or other elements on the page are being loaded. These cookies regulate how the ads appear or how the widgets and other elements function on the page.

Our use of cookies, beacons and similar technologies is to better understand how you interact with our website and email communications. We use cookies on our websites for a variety of reasons including remembering your settings, load balancing, marketing and analytics. These will be either our cookies or third-party cookies, all of which can be configured by you using the cookie preference centre to configure the settings you are most comfortable with.

What cookies do Food Alert use?

Some cookies will expire at the end of a browser session, while other are stored for longer. Types of cookies include:

• Session cookies – these cookies are the ones which allow websites to track the various actions of a user during a browser session. They have a variety of purposes. For example, a session cookie would be working when the website you are visiting remembers what you have put in your shopping basket. Session cookies generally expire after a browser session ends.
• Persistent cookies – these cookies are stored on your device between browser sessions. This is useful because it enables the preferences/actions of the user to be remembered across a website. Persistent cookies are also used for a variety of purposes, however they are mostly known for being used by a website to perform targeted advertising.
• First and third party cookies – first party cookies are the cookies which are set by a specific website visited by the user. Third party cookies are set by a domain which is not the one being visited by the user. For example, if you visit a website and a separate company has set a cookie through that website this would be a third party cookie.

Food Alert use session cookies and persistent cookies which remain on your computer when you close the browser or turn your computer off. We also use the following cookies which fall into four basic categories:

We use 3rd party cookies such as Google Analytics or third parties for advertising purposes, if you do not wish for Google to have your IP address and understand your browsing actions, please do decline cookies. Food Alert also use beacons and pixels in our email communications and on our website, this enables us to understand if our communications are useful to you or not and how you then interact with the website or our service as a result of those email communications.

We may also use a website recording service which may record mouse clicks, mouse movements and page scrolling. This is used to improve our website usability and to discover what works for users and what doesn’t. The information collected isn’t attributed to an individual user but is aggregated and used for statistical reporting. There is no personal data recorded or retained in this process, However, if you prefer, you can switch this off by following this link https://mouseflow.com/opt-out.

For more information see: http://www.allaboutcookies.org/