Cookie Notice

Effective Date: 31/08/2023

1. Introduction

Welcome to cirencester-friendly.co.uk (“we,” “us,” “our,” or “cirencester-friendly”). This Cookie Notice is designed to inform you about the use of cookies, web beacons, and similar tracking technologies (collectively referred to as “cookies”) on our website. This policy outlines how we use cookies and how you can manage your cookie preferences.

2. What Are Cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are stored on your device when you visit a website. They are commonly used to improve your browsing experience by remembering your preferences, enhancing website functionality, and providing data for analytics.

3. Our Use of Cookies

We use two types of cookies on our website:

• Necessary Cookies: We use these cookies to store whether you consented to analytics cookies or not. This means we don’t have to ask you every time you visit our website. These cannot be disabled as they are required for this consent mechanism to function, but you can change your consent at any time by clicking on the little tab in the bottom left-hand corner.

• Analytics Cookies: We use analytics cookies to collect information about how visitors use our website. This helps us understand user behaviour, improve the website’s performance, and enhance user experience. As a mutual, we exist to support our Members. That means we value your privacy, and won’t use any analytics cookies unless you actively opt-in using the cookie banner at the bottom of our website. If you do not choose to opt-in, no analytics cookies will be used, and none of your information will be stored.

Because we want to make sure no-one has access to your data we use Matomo Analytics - a privacy-focused web analytics tool. We securely store all data in our private Amazon Web Services Cloud, where it is encrypted. This data is not accessible to anyone but us, and we’ll never share it.

The data collected is anonymized and aggregated, meaning it cannot be used to personally identify you. The following data is collected if you consent to analytics cookies:

• User IP address (with the last 2 parts (bytes) anonymised e.g. 192.168.xxx.xxx)
• Date and time of the request
• Title of the page being viewed (Page Title)
• URL of the page being viewed (Page URL)
• URL of the page that was viewed prior to the current page (Referrer URL)
• Screen resolution being used
• Time in local user’s timezone
• Files that were clicked and downloaded (Download)
• Links to an outside domain that were clicked (Outlink)
• Pages generation time (the time it takes for webpages to be generated by the webserver and then downloaded by the user: Page speed)
• Country of the user
• Main Language of the browser being used (Accept-Language header)
• User Agent of the browser being used (User-Agent header)

From the User-Agent, we use Matomo’s Universal Device Detection library to detect the browser, operating system, device used (desktop, tablet, mobile, tv, cars, console, etc.), brand and model.

With consent, some information is also stored in first party cookies and then collected by Matomo:

• Random unique Visitor ID
• Time of the first visit for this user
• Time of the previous visit for this user
• Number of visits for this user

4. Cookie Consent and Choices

When you visit our website, you will see a cookie consent banner that provides you with the option to to opt-into or deny the use of cookies. By default, we only use necessary cookies. However, you have the right to opt in or out of non-essential analytics cookies.

You can change your cookie preferences at any time by clicking on the “Cookie Settings” link located in the footer of our website. You can also modify your browser settings to manage cookies. Please note that disabling certain cookies may impact the functionality and performance of our website.

5. Your Consent

By using our website and opting in on cookie use, you consent to the use of cookies as described in this Cookie Notice. If you do not agree to the use of cookies, please do not opt-in using our cookie banner, or refrain from using our website.

6. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Cookie Notice from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or for other operational, legal, or regulatory reasons. Any updates will be effective when we post the revised Cookie Notice on our website.

7. Contact Us

If you have any questions, concerns, or requests related to this Cookie Notice, please contact us using the information provided on the footer at the bottom of this page.

For more information about your privacy rights and how we handle personal data, please review our Privacy Policy.

8. Effective Date

This Cookie Notice was last updated on 31/08/2023.

By continuing to use our website, you acknowledge that you have read and understood this Cookie Notice.