Last updated: 29 August 2019
Cookies, usage analysis and other similar technologies
Like many websites, this website uses cookies, usage analysis and similar technologies. These technologies are operated by us or selected third-parties.
We may use these technologies for a variety of purposes, including helping us to:
- Operate and secure this website
- Provide functionality and content that enhances people’s experience of this website
- Understand how people use this website and our other services, and make improvements
- Promote our work and measure our effectiveness in doing so
You can enable or disable the use of some of these technologies on this website at any time using our privacy settings panel.
Below, you can find out more about these technologies and various ways in which you may be able to control them.
This website is operated by Christian Concern. Your privacy is important to us and you can find out more about how we use personal information in our privacy notice.
External links: The information on this page only applies to this domain (christianconcern.com). If you click on a link on this website that takes you to a third-party website or another Christian Concern website, then your use of that site (and any information that is collected from you or about you) is governed by that website’s policies and notices. We are not responsible for the content or information collected on third-party websites.
Contents
What cookies and other local storage technologies are used on this website?
What information might be collected about my visit to this website?
How can I control cookies, local storage and usage analysis technologies?
What are cookies and other local storage technologies?
What cookies and other local storage technologies are used on this website?
When you visit this website, certain information may be stored locally on your device by webservers operated by us or by selected third-parties.
This information may include cookies and similar technologies (what are cookies and local storage technologies?).
There are various reasons that these storage technologies may be used. We currently group those reasons under three main headings.
1. Core functionality
A very limited amount of information (e.g. cookies) may be stored on your device either by us or by our webhosting provider to enable us to deliver the core functionality of this website to you. We consider the use of this information to be necessary for us to provide a basic experience of this website as we intend it to be, and appropriate given what we think you might expect if you choose to visit this website.
We use a cookie called STYXKEY_your_privacy_settings to remember your privacy settings (i.e. which categories of technology you have enabled).
This is a first-party cookie (i.e. set by us) and is persistent (i.e. persists beyond each visit) and has a lifetime of one year. This cookie is set when you respond to the cookie and privacy settings banner or privacy options panel.
This website is hosted by Pantheon. It is possible that Pantheon (and services that it uses, such as a content delivery network) may use simple local storage (e.g. a cookie called NO_CACHE) to help optimise or secure the delivery of webpages to you.
You can read Pantheon’s privacy policy here.
Certain cookies are set when users log in to our website but since logging in is not a publicly available feature, we do not record those cookies here.
You may be able to use your browser settings (see below) to block the storage and use of this information but if you choose to do this, this website may not function as intended.
Our privacy settings panel does not allow you to disable these technologies as we deem them necessary to the proper functioning of the website.
2. Embedded content (e.g. audio and video)
To enrich your experience of this website and make it more useful to you, we embed selected content from other platforms so that you can engage with it without having to leave this website.
For example, we embed video clips (such as some of our media appearances) from our YouTube channel, and audio clips from our SoundCloud channel.
When you view a page that contains embedded content, the platform that hosts it may store information (e.g. cookies) on your device, and may collect information about your visit. They may do this for a variety of reasons. For example, it may be directly related to providing the service (e.g. such as watching the video) or it may be related to gathering statistics, or providing personalised advertising or related content.
This use of cookies and other locally stored information by these third-party platforms is controlled by them, not by us, and is governed by their own policies. You can find out more about these platforms below.
By default, we disable the use of embedded content (e.g. videos and audio) on this website so that you can decide whether or not to enable these services.
Where these platforms provide us with options to minimise the use of local storage, we try to use those options but we cannot guarantee that we will always do so (e.g. the options can change over time, or may have an effect on other features).
If you choose to enable embedded content, then any content that we embed on a page will be visible to you, and the third-party platform that provides it may store information on your device, and collect information about your visit, as soon as you visit the page, not simply when you interact directly with the content (e.g. information may be set on your device if a video clip is displayed on the page even if you don’t choose to watch it).
You can enable or disable the use of embedded content at any time using our privacy settings panel. You may also be able to use your browser settings or other methods to block or control the storage of information on your device by third-parties (see below).
Currently we may embed content from various platforms, including:
You can find out more about their use of locally stored information (e.g. cookies) by clicking on the relevant ‘Cookie notice’ link.
You can enable or disable embedded content on this website using our privacy settings panel.
3. Analytics and promotion
Like many websites, we use selected third-party services, with whom we have an agreement, to help us understand how people arrive at and use our website, and to measure and improve the effectiveness of some of our promotional activity (e.g. paid promotion on Facebook).
These tools, and information they provide, help us to improve our services and make our website more useful to visitors, to reach more people with information about our work, and to make the best use of our resources. But the information gathered by these third-party services may also be used for their own wider purposes.
Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel products are used on this website.
By default, these services are disabled on this website. You can enable or disable them at any time using our privacy settings panel.
If enabled, these services may store information on your device (e.g. cookies) and use it to observe how you interact with this website (and in some cases, other websites).
Google Analytics may, for example, store first-party cookies named _ga, _gid and _gat.
Facebook may, for example, store a first-party cookie named _fbp and a third-party cookie named fr.
You can read more about our use of these services and how you can control them below.
You can find out more about Google Analytics here, and how you can use the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on to prevent the collection of information by Google Analytics on this and other websites here.
You can read more about Facebook’s use of information here, and its use of cookies and similar technology here.
You can enable or disable the use of Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel technologies on this website using our privacy settings panel.
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What information might be collected about my visit to this website?
When you visit this website, we (and selected third-party services) may collect information about you and your visit.
This information might include your Internet Protocol (IP) address, your internet browser type (e.g. Google Chrome), browser version, the date and time of your visit, which pages you visited and how you arrived at the website.
1. Webserver connection information and logs
Certain information (such as your IP address) is needed by the webserver to provide the web pages that you have requested. Information such as the browser and the type of device that you are using may be used by us to provide web content to you in the best format.
This and other information (e.g. the date and time of the request, browser type) may be stored in server log files by the hosting platform that we use. It may be used to maintain and improve the security and performance of the web server. It is kept for a limited period, in accordance with the web hosting platform’s data retention policy. The web hosting platform may share this information with us.
This website is hosted by Pantheon.
2. Embedded content providers
To enrich your experience of this website and make it more useful to you, we embed selected content from other platforms so that you can engage with it without having to leave this website. If you view a page that contains embedded content, the platform that hosts it may collect information about your visit.
You can find out more about this above.
You can enable or disable embedded content on this website using our privacy settings panel.
3. Usage analysis technologies
Like many websites, we may use various web technologies (including tools supplied by selected third-parties) to help us understand how people arrive at and use this website, and to measure and improve the effectiveness of some of our promotional activity (e.g. paid promotion on Facebook). This helps us to improve our services and make our websites more useful, to reach more people with information about our work, and to make the best use of our resources.
Certain information about you and your visit may be collected as part of this process.
There are various technologies that are commonly used to help collect and process information to achieve this, and these may be used on this website. For example:
- Cookies and local storage: Cookies are small files that a website asks your browser to store on your device. They are one example of local storage technology. Such technology can be used for a variety of reasons but one use is to enable analysis of a website visit by enabling the service to identify visitors.
- Web tags, beacons or pixels: Web beacons or tags are elements (such as tiny images or small bits of code) that are included in webpages to enable collection and processing of information about visits to that page. Similar technology can also be used in email messages to record when emails are opened.
- URL parameters: URL parameters are extra elements that are added to the end of web addresses (e.g. christianconcern.com) to pass useful information back to a webserver. These may be used, for example, to let a web service know how a visitor arrived at a website or to provide the visitor with a customised page.
These technologies may be operated by us or by selected third-party services with whom we have an agreement. The information collected by these tools helps us in our work but in some cases, the information gathered by these third-party services may also be used for their own wider purposes.
By default, these third-party services are disabled on our website and we will not enable them without your consent. You can enable or disable them at any time using our privacy settings panel.
The following third-party services are used on this website and if enabled information may be shared with them:
- Google Analytics is a widely used Google service that helps us to understand how people arrive at and use our website. You can find out more about Google Analytics here, and how you can use the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on to prevent the collection of information by Google Analytics on this and other websites here.
- Facebook Pixel is a Facebook product that helps us to measure and improve the effectiveness of our promotional activity on Facebook platforms. Some of the information collected may be used by Facebook for its own purposes, including determining what content or advertisements you see on Facebook and elsewhere (although you can opt-out of this personalisation in various ways – see below). You can read more about Facebook’s use of information here, and its use of cookies and similar technology here.
You can find out more above about the use of local storage (e.g. cookies) by these services.
You can enable or disable the use of Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel technologies on this website using our privacy settings panel.
4. Other information
You may choose to provide additional information via this website (for example, you might submit a question or ask us to contact you). In general, you do not need to provide this kind of information to us, simply to browse this website. Some specific functionality does require you to provide certain information (e.g. we can’t respond to a question if you don’t provide us with a way of contacting you). It is usually possible, however, to achieve the same outcome through other channels. For example, if you want to ask us a question or make a donation, you can telephone us during office hours.
You can find out more about how we collect and use personal information in our privacy notice.
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How can I control the use of cookies, local storage and usage analysis technologies?
There are various ways in which you may be able to control the use of local storage (e.g. cookies), and usage analysis technologies (and information derived from them), on this or other websites.
For example:
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You can use our privacy settings panel to enable or disable the use of certain local storage and usage analysis technologies on this website.
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You may be able to use your browser settings to block the use of some or all cookies and local storage technologies (although please remember that if you block all of these you may find that this website does not function as intended). You can find out more about how to adjust your browser settings at www.cookiesandyou.com and other similar sites.
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You can install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on to stop your activity on this and other websites being made available to Google Analytics.
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You can use Google settings to adjust whether or not you see personalised adverts via Google’s advertising network based on your browsing behaviour.
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You can use Facebook settings to adjust whether or not you see personalised adverts on Facebook based on your browsing behaviour.
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You can disable certain usage tracking technologies, and can opt-out of the collection and use of information for advertising purposes, by using various services such as:
European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance (Europe)
Digital Advertising Alliance (US)
Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada
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What are cookies and other local storage technologies?
Cookies
‘Cookies’ are small files that a webserver asks your browser to store on your device.
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First-party cookies are cookies that are set and used directly by the website that you are visiting. For example, if you visit one of our websites, we might use a cookie to remember your privacy settings.
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Third-party cookies are cookies that are set and used by a webserver or service different from the website that you are visiting. For example, we might enable you to watch a video from our YouTube channel on our website (e.g. a media clip), and YouTube might use a cookie in the process of providing that video service.
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Session cookies are cookies that aren’t intended to exist any longer than a particular visit to a website. When you finish your visit to a website and close your browser, session cookies are usually deleted automatically (and they may be deleted sooner than that – e.g. during your visit, or after a certain period of not being used).
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Persistent cookies are cookies that may remain on your device beyond a particular visit. For example, we may might use a persistent cookie to remember your privacy settings for a certain period of time, so that you don’t have to re-enter them each time that you visit our website. The ‘lifetime’ or ‘expiry date’ of a persistent cookie is usually set by the website that creates it.
You can find out more about cookies at www.cookiesandyou.com and similar sites.
A small number of first- and third-party cookies may be used on this website, including both session and persistent cookies. Exactly which cookies depends on the settings that you have chosen. You can find out more above.
Other local storage
‘Cookies’ are the best-known example of information stored by a webserver on your device but there are other similar technologies that websites can use to store and use information locally. Examples include HTML5 storage (localStorage, sessionStorage), IndexedDB and Web SQL.
As far as we know, this website does not directly use these forms of local storage but if you choose to enable the use of third-party services and platforms (e.g. you allow us to show video clips from our YouTube channel, or to collect analytics information), then these third-party providers may use these forms of local storage. You can find out more about these third-party services above.
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