1. Our use of cookies
1.1. www.diabetes.co.uk, our Diabetes Forum and Diabetes Recipe mobile apps (the “Sites”) uses cookies, which are small text files stored on a user’s computer by their web browser. DIABETES DIGITAL MEDIA LIMITED (“we”, “us”, “our”) uses cookies to store information about your preferences, speed up your searches, recognise you when you return to our Sites and estimate our audience size and usage pattern (and branded pages on third party platforms (such as Facebook or YouTube)). For details on the specific categories of our cookies and what they are used for please see below.
1.2. You may delete and block all cookies from our Sites by changing your browser settings to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. Making this change may affect the functionality of our Sites and you may not be able to access all or parts of the Sites.
When using our Sites, we will request your explicit consent to our use of cookies.
2. Our cookies
2.1. Strictly necessary cookies
These are cookies that are required for the operation of our Sites for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our Sites or use the shopping basket. These include: ASPSESSIONIDASATTARQ which is used to track your sessio, __support_check which is used by the Sites to store cached images and expires at the end of each sessio, open-panel which is used by the Diabetes Forum and expires in 7 days, sfnDSCookie which is used by the Diabetes Shop to store your session and style_cookie which is used to identify what style you are using on the Diabetes Forum.
2.2. Tracking cookies and pixels
- Tracking cookies are used to provide information on the pages that are viewed. Tracking cookies set from our Sites will be predominantly from Google Analytics and Hitslink. Common cookies you may encounter on our Sites are __utma, __utmb, __utmc, __utmz, __utmv which are for Google Analytics (see How Google uses data when you use our partners’ sites or apps for more information).
- Cookies may occasionally be used to display some users’ surveys or different versions of a page. We then use analytics to identify which version of a page provides a better user experience.
- Cookies may also be set to see how well certain banners ads are received. This helps to identify how many times an advertisement has been see, clicked on or downloaded.
- Tracking pixels may also be set in emails and banner display advertising to monitor the number of times that an email or banner has been seen. They are not used for any other purpose.
- Quantast cookies are set for 365 days and store your tracking cookies (first-party, third-party) preferences (see more information here).
- We use the Facebook Pixel to understand conversion tracking, for optimisation and remarketing purposes. You can opt-in or opt-out when you first visit our Sites and at any point thereafter through your Facebook settings. This includes reg_fb_gate, reg_fb_ref which are Facebook cookies. For information on how to opt out of this feature visit: this page or the Privacy settings tab on the bottom of this page. To view Facebook’s privacy policy visit this page.
- Cookies beginning with hellobar_ are used to show you relevant messaging on pages that you are visiting and the cookie expires in 1 year (see more information here).
- Cookies beginning AddThis.__atuvc, Uit, Ssh, Sshs, Ssc, Uid, Uvc, psc have a duration of 1 month to 1 year. Track usage of AddThis links. The cookies may be set and used on other websites too. AddThis explain their cookies (anonymous tracking cookies) here and offer an opt-out mechanism here.
Third party advertising tracking
Our advertising is delivered to you through our approved advertising partners. The cookies accompanying the ads allow them and our advertisers to monitor the effectiveness of the ads. This helps us to extend the community focus of Diabetes.co.uk beyond our website and do things like cap how many adverts you see, which adverts you may see and the type of advert you may see.
Any company we allow to add tags or code to our website is vetted to ensure that they handle your data responsibly. However, their use of the data is within their control and is subject to their own privacy practices. We take reasonable measures to protect our users’ data and ensure that it is used in-line with our policies. For example, by using advertising technology partners that actively participate in self-regulatory frameworks (such as the EDAA, DAA or NAI). We also run third party auditing services on our site to detect malware and nefarious cookies.
Interest-based ads are sometimes referred to as personalised or targeted ads. We show interest-based ads to display features, products, and services that might be of interest to you and to further the community ethos of Diabetes.co.uk.
What sort of information do we use to show interest-based ads?
To serve you interest-based ads, we use information such as your interactions with Diabetes Digital Media Ltd sites, content, or services. We do not use personally identifiable information such as name or e-mail to serve interest-based ads. In serving you interest-based ads we only keep information collected for as long as required to provide our advertising services, in accordance with our policies and applicable laws.
As is common in the advertising industry, we use cookies, pixels, and other technologies (collectively, “cookies”), which enable us to understand the effectiveness of the interest-based ads we show you by measuring what ads are clicked or viewed, and to provide you with more useful and relevant ads. For example, if we know what ads are shown to your browser we can be careful not to show the same ads repeatedly.
How do we work with third parties to show you interest-based ads?
We work with third parties, such as advertisers, social media networks, search engines, ad serving companies, and advertising companies working on their behalf, to improve the relevance of ads we serve.
In providing you interest-based ads we do not associate your interactions on unaffiliated sites with personally identifiable informatio, and we do not provide any personally identifiable information to advertisers or to third party sites that display our interest-based ads.
Advertisers and other third parties may assume that users who interact with or click on an interest-based ad or content are part of the group that the ad or content is directed towards (for example, users in a geographical area). Some third-parties may provide us non-personally identifiable information about you (such as demographic information or sites where you have been shown ads) from offline and online sources that we may use to provide you more relevant and useful advertising.
Diabetes.co.uk offers you choices about receiving interest-based ads from us. You can choose not to receive interest-based ads from Diabetes.co.uk. You will still see ads, but they will not be based on your interests.
Advertising cookies (of third parties) collect information to help better tailor advertising to your interests, both within and beyond our Sites. In some cases, these cookies involve the processing of your personal data. Refusing these cookies may result in seeing advertising that is not as relevant to you or you not being able to link effectively with Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks and/or not allowing you to share content on social media.
2.3. Diabetes Community Forum cookies
- By browsing Diabetes Forum the xenforo software will create a number of cookies. The first two cookies contain a user identifier (“user-id”) and an anonymous session identifier (“session-id”), automatically assigned to you by the xenforo software. A third cookie will be created once you have browsed topics within the Diabetes Forum and is used to store which topics have been read, thereby improving your user experience.
- Cookies created by the Diabetes Forum will typically last 1 day unless you log out beforehand. style_cookie is a cookie that is used to determine which style you are using on the Diabetes Forum.
3. More information
For more detailed information about cookies please visit www.allaboutcookies.org.
4. Contact us
If you have any questions or comments about the use of cookies on our Sites please contact: help@ddmhealth.zendesk.com.