A cookie is a small text file composed of alphanumeric characters, which is created on your computer when your browser accesses a website that uses cookies. The files are used to help people navigate the website and fully use all its features, such as logins, preferences, language settings and themes, among other common features.
Most cookies are used solely to help your browser process a website and don’t snoop any data within your file system. Cookies can however be used for more intrusive purposes since they store information about a user’s browsing preferences and history, both on a specific site and browsing among several sites. Cookies can also be used to act as a form of spyware.
To find out more about cookies and how they work, visit www.allaboutcookies.org.
From the 26 May 2011, new EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations came into effect stipulating how cookies should be used. We encourage you to accept the cookies our website uses as they help us to improve the user experience for you and many others.
Third party cookies
Third parties that we have contracts with put cookies on our website to increase its functionality, and to provide a seamless experience when navigating between sites.
Examples of this include Modern.Gov, who publish council meeting agendas and minutes on our behalf, Civica, who process payments that are made through our website, and Idox, who provide access to our public planning application registers.
It’s often obvious when you click through to another part of the website that is provided by one of our contractors, as the page will look and feel different – but another way you can tell is to look at the website address. If there is a section before tunbridgewells.gov.uk, or if the website address doesn’t include tunbridgewells.gov.uk it means you’ve been directed to a different site.
Our contractors have their own privacy policies, but they must follow data protection legislation in the same way, and they still have to protect your data.
Social media cookies
So you can easily ‘Like’ or share our content on Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site.
We use cookies to help us do this, which are set by ShareThis.com.
The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.
Site improvement cookies
We sometimes test new designs or site features on our site. We do this by showing slightly different versions of our website to different people and anonymously monitoring how our site visitors respond to these different versions. Ultimately this helps us to offer you a better website.
Annonymous visitor cookies
We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology you are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long you spend on the site, what site you came from originally (e.g. Google search page) and what page you look at. We make assumptions on your age, gender, and interests based on this information. This helps us to continuously improve our website.
We use Google Analytics and DoubleClick to help us do this.
We also use technology to determine how people who phone us arrived on our website (e.g. from a search engine or by clicking on an advert). This is to help us to identify how people heard about us. Please be aware that if you call us, using a phone number on the website we can potentially tell how you arrived on our website. Again this ultimately helps us keep down costs for you.
Controlling the cookies we use to collect information about you
When you accept our use of cookies this helps us to provide a better service to you.
If you do not want to receive cookies from our website, select the ‘cookie settings’ under the ‘privacy settings’ in your browser options, and add our domain name to the list of websites you do not want to accept cookies from.
Under settings you can also delete individual cookies or any cookies that your browser has stored. You can find more information on how to delete and control cookies at https://www.aboutcookies.org/.
If you set your browser to refuse cookies, please be aware that there may be functionality on various websites that do not work, including ours.
If you would like any further information about cookies and what we’re doing to comply with the 2011 legislation please email website@tunbridgewells.gov.uk