Privacy and cookies
What are cookies
When you use our websites, we place a small text file called a ‘cookie’ (made up of letters and numbers) on your computer, tablet or mobile phone’s storage device. Using cookies is a really common practice and helps us to give you the best experience possible on our websites. Cookies are completely harmless and can’t be used to run programs or deliver viruses to your computer.
Find out more about cookies on the Information Commissioner’s Officer (ICO) website.
Types of cookies:
Necessary – absolutely essential for the website to function properly. They ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website.
Functional – help to perform certain functionalities like sharing on social media platforms content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance – Performance cookies are used to understand and analyse the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytics – Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement – Used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
Other – Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analysed and have not been classified into a category as yet.
Third party cookies and targeting
We use third party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites to provide advertisement about goods and services that may be of interest to you. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They store your IP address or other digital identifiers. If you don’t allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising.
Third party cookies
Other websites may set cookies while you browse our websites, usually if you’re already logged into your accounts with them. These are often, but not always, social media accounts and part of the reason they use cookies is so that you can use the buttons on our website to share pages that interest you. These cookies also help us understand how people are using and interacting with our websites and we use this information to improve our websites and online advertising.
Please note that we have no control over these third party cookies and pixels, and you should check the relevant third party websites for more information about these.
What’s a pixel
We also use pixels on our website, which are snippets of code that allow cookies to be downloaded to your device. These pixel tags identify a device as it browses different websites, partly so that targeted adverts can be shown to the user. Scouts don’t receive any identifiable data from pixels. If you disable cookies, your visit to scouts.org.uk website will register as an anonymous visit.
The data Scouts collect
What type of data do we collect on the audleyscouts.org.uk website, and how?
We use website analytics tools such as Google Analytics to understand how you interact with the audleyscouts.org.uk website, which allows us to understand how we can improve the experience you have using the site. The data collected on you via Google Analytics and are anonymous and does not contain personally identifiable information. The data we collect on you from our website includes:
Technical information:
- Internet Protocol (IP) address – whilst an IP address is defined as personal data under data privacy law (Data Protection Act 2018), we do not combine this with other data sets that would further identify an individual to that IP address
- Browser type and version
- Time zone setting
- Browser plug-in types, versions, operating systems and platforms
Information about your visit to the website:
- Pages viewed
- Time spent on each page viewed
- Referring site statistics:
- The website (URI) the user came through in order to arrive at this website (example: clicking on a hyperlink from Yahoo.com that took the user to this website)
- Search engine query used (example: typing in a phrase into a search engine like Google, and clicking on a link from that search engine)
- Usage of site search, including search terms
- External website links clicked on our pages
- Page interaction, including:
- Video plays
- Page scrolling depth
- Clicks on links and buttons
- Clickstream through different pages on the website
- How you navigate through the website
Information about you:
- Geo location (City, Country and Continent)
- Google Analytics collects this automatically from your IP address. We cannot see your exact location or postcode.
- Age & Gender
- Google Analytics collects this information via third-party cookies including the DoubleClick cookie, Android Advertising ID and iOS Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA). Your age and gender are stored in the third party cookies based on information you provide in profiles created for these Apps or Browsers. See these resources to learn how to opt-out of DoubleClick, Android Advertising ID and iOS Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA).
- Browsing and purchasing interests
- Google Analytics collects this information via third-party cookies including the DoubleClick cookie, Android Advertising ID and iOS Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA). These cookies record user browsing and purchasing activities and create In-Market Segments and Affinity Categories that categorise the users’ interests based on their browsing and purchasing history – for example, Technophiles, Sports Fans, and Cooking Enthusiasts. Learn more about Google Analytics Interest reporting. See these resources to learn how to opt-out of DoubleClick, Android Advertising ID and iOS Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA).
Managing your cookies
You’re able to view and delete the cookies stored on your computer/laptop, tablet or mobile phone and if you want to you can prevent cookies from being stored on your device in the future. Information about how to do this can be found in your internet browser’s ‘Help’ pages, or alternatively find out more about how to control your cookies on the ICO’s website.
Managing cookies in your browser
You can control which types of cookies you allow in your web browser. You can turn cookies on or off using your browser’s settings. You can also remove cookies and clear your browser’s history.
The following links describe how you can change your cookie settings in the popular browsers: