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SPAR
Cookies Policy

What are cookies

Most websites you visit will use cookies to help customise your experience. 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 more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site. Rest assured protecting your information is really important to us, and any cookies used on our site do not contain any personally identifiable information.   

How we use cookies

We use cookies to help improve our sites. There are different uses of cookies, for example ones that are necessary for the website to function, ones that allow us to measure improve performance & ones that improve your experience by remembering choices you have made on our site. Some  examples of uses for cookies are listed below, such as:

To remember if you have signed up to a newsletter or email subscription, and to show relevant notifications which may only be valid to subscribers.

If you submit data through a form such as on our contact us page or to customer service, cookies may be set to remember your user details for future correspondence.

Monitor traffic on our site, estimating audience size & usage pattern

Identifying which devices people use to access our site, so we can continue to focus our site improvements on these.

How to manage cookies

If you wish to restrict, block or delete cookies from our website - or any other website - you can use your browser to do this. Each browser is different so check the 'Help' menu of your particular browser to learn how to change your cookie preferences.

Please bear in mind that if you do this, certain personalised features of this website cannot be provided to you.

Third party cookies

We sometimes embed video content and photos from websites such as YouTube or Vimeo.  Pages with this embedded content may present cookies from these websites. We also use Google Analytics to better understand how people use our site & how we can improve site experience. These cookies track things like how long you spend on pages, which helps us to continue to produce relevant & interesting content. In addition, we use social media plug ins to allow you to connect to our social channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Pinterest. For these to work these channels set cookies through our site which may be used to enhance your profile on the relevant channel & contributes to the data they hold about a user, more information on this should be found on their individual privacy policies. We do not control third party cookies, but we do check how they use cookies before allowing them on our site.

Similarly, when you use one of the share buttons on our website, a cookie may be set by the service you have chosen to share content through. You should check any relevant third party websites for more information about these cookies. See below for a full list of cookies used on our website:

 

Strictly Necessary Cookies 

First Party: 

Cookie Name

Description

Lifespan

_dc_gtm_UA-xxxxxxxx

This cookie is associated with sites using Google Tag Manager to load other scripts and code into a page.  Where it is used it may be regarded as Strictly Necessary as without it, other scripts may not function correctly. The end of the name is a unique number which is also an identifier for an associated Google Analytics account.

A few seconds

ASP.NET_SessionId

General purpose platform session cookie, used by sites written with Miscrosoft .NET based technologies. Usually used to maintain an anonymised user session by the server.

Session

__RequestVerificationToken

This is an anti-forgery cookie set by web applications built using ASP.NET MVC technologies. It is designed to stop unauthorised posting of content to a website, known as Cross-Site Request Forgery. It holds no information about the user and is destroyed on closing the browser.

Session

ARRAffinity

This cookie is set by websites run on the Windows Azure cloud platform. It is used for load balancing to make sure the visitor page requests are routed to the same server in any browsing session.

Session

 

Performance Cookies  

First Party:   

_gclxxxx

Google conversion tracking cookie

3 months

_ga

This cookie name is associated with Google Universal Analytics - which is a significant update to Google's more commonly used analytics service. This cookie is used to distinguish unique users by assigning a randomly generated number as a client identifier. It is included in each page request in a site and used to calculate visitor, session and campaign data for the sites analytics reports.  By default it is set to expire after 2 years, although this is customisable by website owners._ga

2 years

optimizelySegments

This cookie is set by the Optimizely website optimisation plaftform.  It holds audience segmentation information for a visitor.

10 years

_gat_UA-nnnnnnn-nn

This is a pattern type cookie set by Google Analytics, where the pattern element on the name contains the unique identity number of the account or website it relates to. It appears to be a variation of the _gat cookie which is used to limit the amount of data recorded by Google on high traffic volume websites.

 

A few seconds

optimizelyBuckets

Cookie set by the Optimizely website optimisation plaftform. Used to store the page variants assigned to a user for A/B performance testing, to ensure the user gets a consistent experience

10 years

_gid

This cookie name is associated with Google Universal Analytics. This appears to be a new cookie and as of Spring 2017 no information is available from Google.  It appears to store and update a unique value for each page visited._gid

A day

optimizelyPendingLogEvents

Cookie set by the Optimizely website optimisation plaftform. Records user activity.

A few seconds

optimizelyEndUserId

Cookie set by the Optimizely website optimisation plaftform. This cookie is a unique user identifier

10 years

 

Functionality Cookies 

First Party:

_pin_unauth

This cookie is associated with pinterest. It is used to track the usage of services.

A year

__atuvc

This cookie  is associated with the AddThis social sharing widget which is commonly embedded in websites to enable visitors to share content with a range of networking and sharing platforms. It stores an updated page share count.

A year

ARRAffinitySameSite

This cookie is set by websites run on the Windows Azure cloud platform. It is used for load balancing to make sure the visitor page requests are routed to the same server in any browsing session.

Session

__atuvs

This cookie is associated with the AddThis social sharing widget which is commonly embedded in websites to enable visitors to share content with a range of networking and sharing platforms. This is believed to be a new cookie from AddThis which is not yet documented, but has been categorised on the assumption it serves a similar purpose to other cookies set by the service.

A few seconds

 

Third Party: 

Vuid

This domain is owned by Vimeo. The main business activity is: Video Hosting/Sharing

2 years

Ci_session

Cookie normally associated with the CodeIgniter framework for building PHP based applications. Usually used to maintain a user state during a browser session for consistancy of user experience. By default the cookie is destroyed when the browser session ends, in which case it can be Strictly Necessary. However, it can optionally be stored in a database and be used for tracking users or other purposes, in such cases a category of Strictly Necessary will probably not apply.

 

A few seconds

Player

This domain is owned by Vimeo. The main business activity is: Video Hosting/Sharing

A year

 

Targeting Cookies 

 

First Party: 

 

_fbp

Used by Facebook to deliver a series of advertisement products such as real time bidding from third party advertisers

3 months

 

 Third Party:

 

xtc

This domain is owned by AddThis. AddThis provides web widgets that site owners embed into their pages or other content to enable visitors to create and share links to the content across social networks. They also make use of the data collected to provide advertisers and marketers with profile information for targeted behavioural advertising.

A year

CONSENT

YouTube is a Google owned platform for hosting and sharing videos. YouTube collects user data through videos embedded in websites, which is aggregated with profile data from other Google services in order to display targeted advertising to web visitors across a broad range of their own and other websites.

16 years

__atuvs

This domain is owned by Addthis. The main business activity is: AddThis provides web widgets that site owners embed into their pages or other content, to enable visitors to create and share links to the content across social networks. They also make use of the data collected to provide advertisers and marketers with profile information for targeted, behavioural advertising.

 

A few seconds

YSC

YouTube is a Google owned platform for hosting and sharing videos. YouTube collects user data through videos embedded in websites, which is aggregated with profile data from other Google services in order to display targeted advertising to web visitors across a broad range of their own and other websites.

Session

Facebook

 

This domain is owned by Facebook, which is the world's largest social networking service.  As a third party host provider, it mostly collects data on the interests of users via widgets such as the 'Like' button found on many websites.  This is used to serve targeted advertising to its users when logged into its services.  In 2014 it also started serving up behaviourally targeted advertising on other websites, similar to most dedicated online marketing companies.

Session

 

 

test_cookie

This domain is owned by Doubleclick (Google). The main business activity is: Doubleclick is Googles real time bidding advertising exchange

A few seconds

NID

This domain is owned by Google Inc. Although Google is primarily known as a search engine, the company provides a diverse range of products and services. Its main source of revenue however is advertising. Google tracks users extensively both through its own products and sites, and the numerous technologies embedded into many millions of websites around the world. It uses the data gathered from most of these services to profile the interests of web users and sell advertising space to organisations based on such interest profiles as well as aligning adverts to the content on the pages where its customer's adverts appear.

6 months

IDE

This domain is owned by Doubleclick (Google). The main business activity is: Doubleclick is Googles real time bidding advertising exchange

A year

VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE

This cookie is used as a unique identifier to track viewing of videos

6 months

uvc

Tracks how often a user interacts with AddThis

A year

Visitor_id

This is a cookie pattern (visitor_id) that appends a unique identifier for a website visitor, used for tracking purposes. The cookies in this domain have lifespans of 10 years.This is a cookie pattern that appends a unique identifier for a website visitor, used for tracking purposes. The cookies in this domain have a lifespan of 10 years.

A year

__atrfs

This domain is owned by Addthis. The main business activity is: AddThis provides web widgets that site owners embed into their pages or other content, to enable visitors to create and share links to the content across social networks. They also make use of the data collected to provide advertisers and marketers with profile information for targeted, behavioural advertising.

A few seconds