What are cookies?
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer, tablet or mobile phone when you browse websites. They allow website owners to provide visitors with a better browsing experience by making websites work as intended. Cookies can improve the speed and security of a site and can monitor which pages people find useful and which they don’t. A cookie in no way gives access to your computer but it can capture certain information about you beyond the data you share through forms and transactions. For more on Brandsistency’s use of data, please refer to our privacy notice.
According to the GDPR and the UK Data Protection Act, websites that use more than just ‘essential’ or ‘strictly necessary’ cookies must obtain visitor consent before placing cookies on the their device. You’ll be familiar with the cookie consent banners that appear on most websites. In addition, you can usually modify browser settings to decline cookies automatically, but this may prevent you from taking full advantage of a website’s features.
Let’s take a look at the different types of cookie.
Strictly necessary cookies
Cookies that fall into this category are crucial to the functioning of a website and, as a result, do not require visitor consent because they don’t capture any PII (Personally Identifiable Information) by default. The strictly necessary cookies...
| Cookie | Duration | Description |
|---|---|---|
| cf_clearance | 1 year | This cookie is set by Cloudflare to identify trusted web traffic and override any security restrictions based on a visitor’s IP address. It’s essential for supporting this website’s security features and providing protection against malicious visitors. |
| AWSALBCORS | 7 days | This is a third-party load-balancing cookie used by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to manage the volume of user traffic and ensure a smooth browsing experience on the TrustedSite website (trustedsite.com), which is referenced on our website. |
Functionality cookies
Mostly used to enhance a website’s performance, functional cookies are not vital for a website to run. They might be used to remember preferences, for example the user’s location, to offer personalised news stories and weather reports. The functionality cookies that this site uses are...
| Cookie | Duration | Description |
|---|---|---|
| cookie-note | 7 days | Ironically, one cookie belongs to the banner display to tell you that we use cookies! This one remembers whether you’ve acknowledged the cookie banner so that it isn’t shown again. No personal information is captured. |
| trustedsite_visit | 1 day | TrustedSite monitors website security, scanning for threats like malware and malicious links, and displays the TrustedSite badge in the bottom right corener of the page when no threats are found. This cookie simply counts the number of site visitors — multiple visits by the same user in a 24-hour period are counted as one visit. It captures no personal information. |
| trustedsite_tm_float_seen | 5 mins | This cookie remembers whether you’ve seen the TrustedSite badge, so that it can show the ‘compressed’ version. It captures no personal info and expires after just 5 minutes. |
Performance cookies
Sometimes referred to as ‘analytics’ or ‘statistics’ cookies, performance cookies capture information about how visitors browse a website — which pages are popular, the journeys they take, how long they stay, etc. That info helps website owners to continue offering the best user experience on their sites.
Google Analytics is the best known and most popular service for capturing visitor information but we don’t use it. It isn’t GDPR-compliant by default and has been the subject of a lot of recent controversy, resulting in lawsuits and even fines. Instead, we use a cookie-free analytics solution, which gives us sight of key website metrics but without capturing visitor data. All the info with none of the risks.
Targeting cookies
Targeting cookies are designed to market to customers with targeted ads. Captured data can also be shared with third parties so that the performance of ads can be monitored and measured. Targeting cookies also help to create user profiles, building a picture of a user’s likes, dislikes, habits, purchases, etc. By capturing visitor data, websites can then display ads to customers based on their personal preferences. We do not use any targeting cookies.