Your privacy – how cookies are used by the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult
Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult uses small amounts of data stored on your computer called ‘cookies’ to collect information about how visitors use the website. You can control what cookies, if any, are stored on your computer. Find out more about cookies below.
Details of how to request personal information under the Data Protection Act (1998) can be found on our Terms & conditions page.
1.1 What is a cookie?
A cookie is a small amount of data sent to your computer or mobile phone from a website. It often includes a unique identifier and is stored on your device’s hard drive. Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult doesn’t use cookies to collect information that can be used to identify you.
Each website can send its own cookie to your browser if your browser’s preferences allow it. Your browser is the computer program you use to access the internet. By default, your browser will only allow a website to access the cookies it’s already sent to you, and not the cookies sent to you by any other website. This is to protect your privacy.
For more information go to:http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/guides/about-cookies
1.2 Types of cookies
There are effectively four different variants of cookies that websites create:
- Session cookies – These types of cookies are only valid when the user browses a site and are expired when the user leaves a website. Session cookies are used to remember if a user has logged into a website for example.
- Persistent cookies – Persistent cookies are not cleared when a user closes their browser. They are used to remember if the user has visited the site before, whether they ticked a ‘remember me’ type checkbox when logging into the site or where the user visited the website from. These types of cookies generally have a fixed time-frame before expiring, for example a year.
- First party cookies – First party cookies are examples that are only used within one particular website. Data from the cookie isn’t accessible to other websites.
- Third party cookies – These cookies do contain data that third party websites can access. Examples include social media sharing controls or analytics based websites.
1.3 Services that need cookies to work
Some services need to store a cookie on your computer for them to work. These cookies are removed when you finish using the service. If cookies are blocked then these services will not work.
1.4 Controlling what cookies are stored on your computer
You can set your devices to:
- Accept all cookies
- Tell you when a cookie is being received
- Not receive cookies
- Each browser is different, so check the ‘Help’ menu of your browser to learn how to change your cookie preferences
1.5 Rejecting cookies
If you want to restrict or block the cookies set by Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult you can do this through your browser settings. The ‘Help’ menu in your browser should explain how you can do this, as well as how to delete cookies from your computer. For more information, see the ‘About cookies’ website.
How to control or delete cookies: http://www.aboutcookies.org/
1.6 Mobile phones – rejecting cookies
For information about how to reject cookies on your mobile phone’s browser, see your handset manual.
1.7 Third party cookies on http://www.innovateuk.org/
Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. Google Analytics sets a cookie in order to evaluate your use of the site.
Google stores the information collected by the cookie on servers in the United States. Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google’s behalf. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. By using the site, you consent to the processing of data about you by Google in the manner and for the purposes set out above.
How to reject or delete this cookie: http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html
ClickTale – customer experience analytics
ClickTale module is used to analyse where users click/browse through a website.
How to reject or delete this cookie: http://www.clicktale.net/disable.html
1.8 Full list of cookies on http://www.innovateuk.org/
The following are names of cookies that are currently witnessed on the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult website. Each cookie includes a short description of what the cookie does and what type of variant the cookie falls into.
| Name of cookie | Cookie Variant | Description |
| ASP.NET_sessionID | Session cookie, First party cookie | General purpose session cookie. Used to remember if the user is currently navigating the website. This cookie contains the user’s session ID and the cookie will expire at the end of the session (when you close your browser). |
| _ck Session cookie | First party cookie | Content Management System generated and is currently not utilized or saving any data. |
| AuthCookie | Persistent cookie, First party cookie | Used on some websites to remember if the user is still logged into the site despite closing the browser (the cookie is valid for 30 minutes from the point of creation). |
| _utma | Persistent cookie, Third party cookie | This cookie (which is part of Google analytics) keeps track of the number of times a visitor has been to the site pertaining to the cookie, when their first visit was, and when their last visit occurred. |
| _utmb | Persistent cookie, Third party cookie | Used to create a timestamp of the exact moment in time when a visitor enters a site. This cookie is part of Google analytics in conjunction with the _utmc cookie. |
| _utmc/td> | Persistent cookie, Third party cookie | Used to create a timestamp of the exact moment in time when a visitor leaves a site. This cookie is part of Google analytics in conjunction with the _utmb cookie. |
| _utmz | Persistent cookie, Third party cookie | _utmz keeps track of where the visitor came from, what search engine the visitor used, what link the visitor clicked on, what keyword the visitor used, and where they were in the world when the user accessed the website. This cookie is part of Google analytics. |
| WRUID | Persistent cookie, Third party cookie | Used by the ClickTale module to analyse where users click/browse through a website |
| WRIgnore | Persistent cookie, Third party cookie | Used by the ClickTale module to disable user experience monitoring. |
