Cookies on pbs-group.co.uk
This site, like many others, uses small files called cookies to help customise your experience. Find out more about cookies and how you can control them
This page contains information on what ‘cookies’ are, the cookies used by pbs-group.co.uk, how to switch cookies off in your browser, how to specifically disable third party advertising cookies, and some useful links for further reading on the subject. If it does not provide the information you were looking for, or you have any further questions about the use of cookies on pbs-group.co.uk, please email dataprotection@pbs-group.co.uk.
What are ‘cookies’?
‘Cookies’ are small text files that are stored by the browser (e.g. Internet Explorer or Safari) on your computer or mobile phone. They allow websites to store such things as user preferences. You can think of cookies as providing a “memory” for the website, enabling it to recognise a user and respond appropriately.
How does pbs-group.co.uk use cookies?
A visit to a page on pbs-group.co.uk may generate the following types of cookie:
Site performance cookies
Anonymous analytics cookies
Geotargetting cookies
Registration cookies
Advertising cookies
Third party advertising cookies
Site performance cookies
This type of cookie remembers your preferences for tools found on pbs-group.co.uk, so you don’t have to re-set them each time you visit. Examples include:
– volume settings for our video player
– whether you see the latest or the oldest article comments first
– video streaming speeds that are compatible with your browser
Anonymous analytics cookies:
Every time a user visits our website, web analytics software provided by a third party generates an anonymous analytics cookie.
These cookies can tell us whether or not you have visited the site before.
Your browser will tell us if you have these cookies, and if you don’t, we generate new ones.
This allows us to track how many individual unique users we have, and how often they visit the site.
Unless you are signed in to pbs-group.co.uk, these cookies cannot be used to identify individuals; they are used for statistical purposes only. If you are logged in, we will also know the details you gave to us for this, such as username and email address.
Geotargetting cookies
These cookies are used by software which tries to work out what country you are in from information supplied by your browser when it requests a web page. This cookie is completely anonymous, and is only used to help target content – such as whether you see our UK our US home page – and advertising.
Registration cookies
When you register with pbs-group.co.uk, we generate cookies that signal whether you are signed in or not.
Our servers use these cookies to work out which account you are signed in with, and if you are allowed access to a particular service. It also allows us to associate any comments you post with your username.
If you have not selected ‘keep me signed in,’ your cookies get deleted when you either close your browser or shut down your computer.
While you are signed into either of the sites, we combine information from your registration cookies with analytics cookies, which we could use to identify which pages you have seen on the pbs-group.co.uk as an individual,
Advertising cookies
These cookies allow us to know whether or not you’ve seen an advert or a type of advert, and how long it is since you’ve seen it.
We also use cookies to assist in targeted advertising. We may use cookies set by a third party to more accurately target advertising to you, to show, for example, adverts about holidays to users who have recently visited the travel section of our site. These cookies are anonymous – they store information about the content you are browsing, but not about who you are.
We also set anonymous cookies on certain other sites that we advertise on. If you receive one of those cookies, we may then use it to identify you as having visited that site if you later visit the pbs-group.co.uk, and will serve targeted advertising based on this information.
Third party advertising cookies
A lot of the advertisements you see on pbs-group.co.uk are generated by third parties. Some of these third parties use their own anonymous cookies to track how many people have seen a particular ad, or to track how many people have seen it more than once.
The companies that generate these cookies have their own privacy policies, and pbs-group.co.uk has no access to read or write these cookies. These third party advertising cookies may be used by those third parties to anonymously target advertising to you on other websites, based on your visit to pbs-group.co.uk.
Other third party cookies
On some pages of pbs-group.co.uk, third parties may also set their own anonymous cookies, for the purposes of tracking the success of their application, or customising the application for you. Because of how cookies work, pbs-group.co.uk cannot access these cookies, nor can the third parties access the data in cookies used by pbs-group.co.uk.
For example, when you share an article using a social media sharing button on pbs-group.co.uk, the social network that has created the button will record that you have done this.
How do I turn cookies off?
It is usually possible to stop your browser accepting cookies, or to stop it accepting cookies from a particular website. For example, we cannot tell if you are signed in without using cookies, so you would not be able to post comments.
All modern browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. These settings will typically be found in the ‘options’ or ‘preferences’ menu of your browser. In order to understand these settings, the following links may be helpful; alternatively you should use the ‘Help’ option in your browser for more details.
Cookie settings in Internet Explorer
Cookie settings in Firefox
Cookie settings in Chrome
Cookie settings in Safari web and iOS.
If you are primarily concerned about third party cookies generated by advertisers, you can turn these off by going to the Your Online Choices site.
Useful links
If you would like to find out more about cookies and their use on the Internet, you may find the following links useful:
Microsoft Cookies guide
All About Cookies
The IAB has provided the following website to give information specifically about privacy issues around Internet advertising:
youronlinechoices.co.uk/uk
For further legal information about privacy issues, you may find these links useful:
Data Protection Act 1998
The Information Commissioner’s Office
If you would like to contact us about cookies please email us at dataprotection@pbs-group.co.uk.