We use cookies on our website. By using our website you agree to this Policy and you consent to our use of cookies in accordance with the terms of this Policy.
1. What are Cookies?
Cookies are small text files that are stored by the browser (for example, Internet Explorer or Safari) on your computer or mobile phone. They allow websites to store things like user preferences. You can think of cookies as providing a ‘memory’ for the website, so that it can recognise you when you come back and respond appropriately.
2. How does the Courses.ie website use cookies?
A visit to a page on the Courses.ie website may generate the following types of cookie:
- Site performance cookies
- Anonymous analytics cookies
- Geotargetting cookies
- Registration cookies
- Advertising cookies
- Third party advertising cookies
3. Site Performance Cookies
This type of cookie remembers your preferences for tools found on Courses.ie, 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
4. Anonymous Analytics Cookies
Every time someone visits our website, software provided by another organisation generates an “anonymous analytics cookie”.These types of cookies include, but are not limited to, Google Analytics and Hotjar and are anonymous. This allows Courses.ie to measure the type of visits to the website and view how content is performing. They also allow us to see if you have visited the website before and whether to generate a new cookie if you are a first-time user. Your browser will tell us if you have these cookies and, if you don’t, we generate new ones.
Unless you are signed in to Courses.ie, we cannot use these cookies to identify individuals. We use them to gather statistics, for example, the number of visits to a page. If you are logged in, we will also know the details you gave to us for this, such as your username and email address.
5. Geotargeting Cookies
These cookies are used by software which tries to work out what country you are in from the information supplied by your browser when you click on a web page. This cookie is completely anonymous, and we only use it to help target our content and advertising.
6. Registration Cookies
When you register with Courses.ie, we generate cookies that let us know 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 Courses.ie.
7. 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 help us use targeted advertising. We may use cookies set by another organisation so we can more accurately target advertising to you. For example, we may show adverts about holidays if you have recently visited the travel section of our site. These cookies are anonymous – they store information about what you are looking at on our site, 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 Courses.ie. We can then target our advertising based on this information.
Advertisements you see on Courses.ie may be provided by other organisations. Some of these organisations 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 we have no access to read or write these cookies. These organizations may use their cookies to anonymously target advertising to you on other websites, based on your visit to Courses.ie.
8. Other third-party Cookies
These are cookies that are set by another organisation. They are used to assess the performance of their applications or to customise the applications preferences. Courses.ie does not have any access to these cookies and the various third parties will have their own Cookie Policy (see our Privacy Policy for a list of third party services we use and links to their own policies). Organisations that Courses.ie use that may generate their own cookies include, but are not limited to, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube and Soundcloud.
On some pages of our website, other organisations may also set their own anonymous cookies. They do this to track the success of their application, or to customise the application for you. Because of how cookies work, our website cannot access these cookies, nor can the other organisation access the data in cookies we use on our website. For example, when you share an article using a social-media sharing button (for example, Facebook) on Courses.ie, the social network that has created the button will record that you have done this.
9. How do I turn Cookies off?
It is possible to stop your browser accepting cookies, or to stop it accepting cookies from a particular website. However, we cannot tell if you are signed in without using cookies, so you would not be able to avail of many features on our website, for example, posting comments, if you do not have Cookies enabled.
All modern browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. To understand these settings, the following links may be helpful, or you can 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.
10. 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
We update our Cookies Policy from time to time as legislation and internal operating procedures change. Contact our Data Protection Officer at [email protected] for any further clarifications or personal data requests. We aim to address any questions or queries as soon as possible; please allow up to 30 working days for a response.
