Community Action for Water Cookie Policy
Version 1.0 - effective from 24th August 2021.
We collect information from your visits to our websites and your use of our social media pages to help us gather statistics about usage and effectiveness, personalise your experience, tailor our interactions with you, and improve our service. We use “cookies” to do this.
What are cookies and why are cookies used?
Cookies are used by nearly all websites and do not harm your system. A cookie is a piece of data that a website can send to your browser, which may then be stored on your computer as a tag that identifies your computer. While cookies are often only used to measure website usage (such as number of visitors and duration of visit) and effectiveness (such as topics visitors are most interested in) and to allow for ease of navigation or use and, as such, are not associated with any personal information, they are also used at times to personalise a known visitor’s experience of a website by being associated with profile information or user preferences. Over time this information provides valuable insight to help improve the user experience.
Cookies are typically classed as “session” cookies or “persistent” cookies.
Session cookies help you navigate through the website efficiently, keeping track of your progression from page to page so that you are not asked for information you have already provided during the current visit, or information needed to be able to complete a transaction. Session cookies are stored in temporary memory and erased when the web browser is closed.
Persistent cookies on the other hand, store user preferences for current and successive visits. They are written on your device’s hard disk and are still valid when you restart your browser. We use persistent cookies, for example, to record your choice of language and country location and for Google Analytics.
Cookies can also be categorised as:
Strictly necessary cookies: These cookies are essential to enable you to use the website effectively, such as when accessing a service, and therefore cannot be turned off. Without these cookies, the services available to you on our website cannot be provided. These cookies do not gather information about you that could be used for marketing or remembering where you have been on the internet.
Performance cookies: These cookies enable us to monitor and improve the performance of our website. For example, they allow us to count visits, identify traffic sources and see which parts of the site are most popular.
Functionality cookies: These cookies allow our website to remember choices you make and provide enhanced features. For instance, we may be able to provide you with news or updates relevant to the services you use. They may also be used to provide services you have requested such as viewing a video or commenting on a blog. The information these cookies collect is usually anonymised.
If you want to check or change what types of cookies you accept, this can usually be altered within your browser settings. You can block cookies at any time by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our site.
How to express privacy preferences regarding the use of cookies
When visiting our websites or online services, you may have the possibility to set your preferences regarding cookies and other similar technologies by using the options and tools made available to you by your web browser. If a cookie manager has been implemented by Community Action for Water, it will be displayed at your first visit to our website.
Whilst Community Action for Water’s website, online and social media services at this time do not recognise automated browser signals regarding tracking mechanisms, such as “do not track” instructions, you can generally express your privacy preferences regarding the use of most cookies and similar technologies through your web browser. Look under the heading “Tools” (or similar heading) in your particular browser for information about controlling cookies. In most instances you can set your browser to notify you before you receive a cookie, giving you the option to decide whether to accept it or not. You can also generally set your browser to turn off cookies. Cookies in our software products can be turned off in the product itself. Since cookies allow you to take advantage of some of our websites’ features or features of our software products and cloud services, we recommend that you leave them turned on. If you block, turn off or otherwise reject our cookies, some web pages may not display properly, or you will not be able to, for instance, use any website or cloud services that require you to sign in.
Contact us
If you have any questions about our Cookie Policy, please contact us at: Community Action for Water, Interdisciplinary Centre of the Social Sciences (ICOSS), 219 Portobello, Broomhall, Sheffield S1 4DP. Email: cafw@sheffield.ac.uk.