What are cookies?
Cookies are small pieces of data that a website asks your browser to store on your computer or mobile device when you visit the website or certain pages. The cookie allows the website to “remember” your actions or preferences over time. Most browsers support cookies, but users can set their browsers to decline them and can delete them whenever they like.
Cookies will usually contain the name of the website where the cookie has come from, how long the cookie will remain on your device, and a value which is usually a randomly generated unique number.
Some cookies will be deleted as soon as you leave the website (the so-called “session cookies”), other cookies will remain stored on your computer or mobile device and will help us identify you as a visitor of our website (the so-called “permanent cookies”).
Why do we use cookies?
Cookies on our Website are used for a variety of different purposes.
We use cookies to improve the user-experience on the Website and to map your surfing behaviour (e.g. the pages you have visited and the time you spent on that page). Cookies make our Website easier to use and allow us to better tailor our Website to your interests and needs. Cookies are also used to help speed up your future activities and experience on the Website. We use cookies, for example, to remember your language preferences.
We also use cookies to compile anonymous, aggregated statistics that allow us to understand how our Website is being used and how we can improve our services.
Which cookies do we use?
We use first party and third party cookies:
First party cookies are cookies created by the Website itself. These cookies are used to optimize your user-experience.
Third party cookies are cookies created by parties other than the Website. Third party cookies in relation to our Website are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Analytics. Google Analytics is Google’s analytics tool which helps us understand how you engage with the Website. It may use a set of cookies to collect information and report Website usage statistics without personally identifying individual visitors to Google. The main cookie used by Google Analytics is the ‘___ga’ cookie.
A further distinction can be made between the following types of cookies:
-
Analytical/performance cookies: These cookies allow us to analyse our webtraffic, to see the number of users of our Website and how the users navigate through our Website.
Our analytical/performance cookies are named here:
_ga Google Analytics _gid Google Analytics -
Functional cookies: These cookies ‘remember’ the choices you made on our Website (e.g. language preference) making the Website more user-friendly and enhancing your user experience.
Our functional cookies are named here:
xtiCookieMessage xt-i
How can you manage or delete cookies?
You can at any time manage or delete cookies using the settings on your internet browser, allowing you to refuse some or all cookies. Turning off cookies will limit the service that we are able to provide and may affect your user-experience. Deleting cookies may result in manually adjusting preferences every time you visit our Website. For more details about controlling and/or deleting cookies, visit the page corresponding to your browser for more information:
For other browsers, please consult the documentation provided by the browser operator.
