Cookies
We use three types of cookies:
- essential
- advertising and tracking
- analytics and customisation
Essential
These cookies are essential to you moving around the websites and using its features, like accessing secure areas. Without these cookies our websites won’t work properly.
Advertising and tracking
We advertise our own products and services on our website and you may see adverts for us elsewhere on the internet. The cookies mean we can show you adverts based on the content you visit the most, therefore topics you’re most interested in. The cookies show us where you saw the advert, help us understand how effective our advertising is and limit the number of times you see an advert. We also use cookies to tailor the content of our newsletter and the emails we send you so that the content is more relevant to you. Cookies help us to see which of our articles are most popular and the types of journey visitors have to our websites. If we include links to social networks like Facebook they may use information about your visit to target advertising to you on their websites.
Analytics and customisation
Our analytics cookies collect information about how you use our website and help us improve how it works. For instance, this could be the pages you visit most often and error messages from those pages.
We also have customisation cookies that allow us to remember the choices you make (such as your username and password) and give more personal features. These cookies can also be used to remember changes you’ve made to text size, fonts and other parts of our web pages that you can customise.
They may also be used to provide services you’ve asked for such as watching a video or commenting on a blog.
How we use cookies
We use traffic log cookies to identify which pages are being used. This helps us analyse data about web page traffic and improve our website in order to tailor it to visitors’ needs. We only use this information for statistical analysis and then the data is removed from the system.
Cookies help us provide you with a better website, by seeing which pages you find useful and not. A cookie in no way gives us access to your computer or any information about you, other than the data you choose to share with us. You can accept or decline cookies. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can change your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. This may prevent you from taking full advantage of the website.
Cookies we use
__utma – Google Analytics: We use Google Analytics to monitor traffic levels, search queries and visits to this website.
__utmb – Google Analytics stores IP address anonymously on its servers in the US, and neither CIVIC or Google associate your IP address with any personally identifiable information.
__utmc – These cookies enable Google to determine whether you are a return visitor to the site, and to track the pages that you visit during your session.
__utmz
_gat_ – Used to throttle request rate
PHPSESSID – Default PHP cookie that fires as soon as a session starts on the website, and ends when the browser closes.
__gid gtag_ – Google Analytics to distinguish users
What’s a web beacon?
Web beacons are usually tiny transparent images or anchor tags that help website owners track what people do on web pages. They can also send us information in cookies such as whether an email has been opened. We use web beacons with cookies to better understand our website and the emails we send you. They help us improve the site, make sure content is relevant to you and to better manage our site and email content.