What is a cookie?
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site.
A cookie is a short text file sent to your browser from the web server or web servers that host the files of the website you are viewing. You may encounter two types of cookies: session cookies and persistent cookies. Session cookies are only active as long as you're using your browser. Once you close your browser, the cookie is deleted. Persistent cookies remain on your hard drive until they reach their expiry date or you delete them.
Many websites use cookies to enable features such as determining whether the computer (and probably its user) has visited the website before. This is done on future visits by checking for the unique identifier in a cookie left there on a previous visit. Some users object to this practice and choose to reject all or some cookies, but it can be a convenience for both website visitors and operators because it allows the collection of usage statistics that assist in improving the online experience for visitors. Other uses include keeping track of items in online shopping carts and reducing the amount of time to enter and process the same information each time a website is visited.
Cookies, whether session or persistent, are also described as first-party or third-party cookies. Cookies relating to content coming from the page’s primary server are first party cookies and where the web page’s content does not come from the page's primary server they are referred to as third-party cookies. These third-party cookies are sometimes used to compile usage statistics on behalf of the site owner or, on commercial web sites, they may be associated with advertising and are used to track the effectiveness of the ad. To protect your privacy, your browser only permits a web server to access the cookies already sent to you from its domain, not the cookies sent to you by web servers from other domains.
How we use cookies
We use cookies to control access to secure parts of the website, for example, for some advanced functionality. (There are currently no session cookies in use on this site however this page will be updated should this change.)
We also use cookies via Google Analytics in order to track the usage of our site. It is an important aid in improving and maintaining our website. When someone visits our website we collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. We collect this information in a way which does not identify anyone. We do not make any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website. We will not associate any data gathered from this site with any personally identifying information from any source. If we do want to collect personally identifiable information through our website, we will be up front about this. We will make it clear when we collect personal information and will explain what we intend to do with it.
All of our cookies are anonymous and session based (unless noted) and we hold no personal information in any of our cookies.
If you do not wish to use cookies then please disable them using your browser settings.
Cookies used by this website
Listed here are all the cookies that we use to manage website delivery to your browser:
Cookies created by us:
Session Cookies:
We do not currently use any Session Cookies on this website. A Session Cookie can be used to enhances the user experience when using a website. We do not use these for tracking the individual but to assist with any advanced functionality. They are not stored on your computer and they expire when you terminate your browser session.
Cookie Policy opt in cookie:
This cookie is applicable to only users to the UK (paddington.com/gb) and French sites (paddington.com/fr) who accept the Cookie Policy opt in on their visit to either site.
Cookies created by Google Analytics
- our website usage tracking software:
These cookies are all used together to record statistics about the usage of the website. For more detailed information please see the Google Analytics cookie information.
Google Analytics uses cookies to define user sessions as well as to provide a number of key features in the Google Analytics reports. Google Analytics sets or updates cookies only to collect data required for the reports and cookies set by Google Analytics for this website and only send data to our servers, effectively making these cookies the personal property of our website domain. The data cannot be altered or retrieved by any service on any other domain. All have a medium level of privacy tracking.
__utma. This Cookie is used to identify unique visitors to our sites. The results are sent to our Google Analytics account so that we may see how many unique visitors come to this site based over a period of time. This is a persistent cookie and expires in 2 years.
__utmb. This cookie is used by Google Analytics to determine the visitor session times on our sites. Each time you visit a new page on the site the cookie is set to expire within 30 minutes, if it does not find an existing cookie, a new one is created.
__utmc. This cookie is used by Google Analytics in conjunction with __utmb to determine visitor sessions. Unlike __utmb this cookie does not have an expiry date, it determines whether a new session should be created based on whether you have previously closed your browser, re-opened it and come back to the site. As a Session cookie, it runs just for that visit.
__utmz. This cookie is used by Google Analytics to determine the type of referral used by each visitor to arrive at our site. The cookie determines if the user has come directly to the site or via a search engine, email or email campaign. We use this data to understand how our users arrive at the website. It is a persistent cookie and expires in 6 months.
For further information:
developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/gaConceptsCookies#HowGAUsesCookies
More information about cookies
The following sites have more information about cookies and how they are used by websites:
www.aboutcookies.org - Useful information on how to control your cookie usage.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie - Information on what a cookie is and how it is used.
www.ico.gov.uk - Government guidance on how cookies can be used.
