Privacy and cookie policy

Independent News and Media Limited and its associated companies fully respect your right to privacy.

(Updated on 04/05/2017)

This Privacy and Cookie Policy applies to the operations of this website (“belfasttelegraph.co.uk website”) operated by Independent News and Media Limited, which is part of Independent News & Media PLC, a company registered in the United Kingdom under number 1908967 and having its registered office at 39 Welbeck Street, London, W1G 8DR (hereinafter “INM”). For the purposes of this agreement “INM” shall mean Independent News & Media plus any Subsidiaries thereof and “Subsidiaries” has the meaning given to it by the Companies Act 2006. INM fully respect your right to privacy.

INM and its associated companies fully respect your right to privacy.

Data Protection: What information do we collect?

Our primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide you with the best and most useful content to help improve your online experience.

We collect certain kinds of information about our users for these reasons:

1. To provide personalised services unique to individual users.

2. To help us to monitor and improve the services we offer.

3. To sell advertising space on the site.

4. With user consent, to market services to individual users.

Visitors should be aware that each time they visit a website two general levels of information about their visit can be retained. The first level comprises statistical and other analytical information collected on an aggregate and non-individual specific basis of all browsers who visit the site, and the second is information that is personal or particular to a specific visitor who knowingly chooses to provide that information. It is policy of this website to respect and protect the privacy of our Customers and never wilfully disclose individually identifiable information about its Customers to any third party without first receiving that Customer’s permission.

We may, however, occasionally email you with information or queries about your registration or accounts, for instance to request permissions or advise you of changes.

No personally identifiable information is collected about you on this website, apart from information which you volunteer (for example by emailing us, using our online forms or by making an inquiry about content or services).

Throughout this website you may have an opportunity to send us information relating to you such as through the “contact us” pages or any other area where you may send e-mails, request brochures, enter contests or respond to any promotions. By choosing to participate in these, you will be providing us with some level of personal information relating to you. This information will only be used by INM for:

• the purposes for which it was provided by you;
• verification purposes and statistical analysis;
• to provide you with details of products, services, contests, competitions or promotions being provided or run by INM or any of its associated companies or any third party that we may select and which we may think would be of interest to you, in line with your request to receive this information.

What are Cookies

Cookies are small pieces of information, stored in simple text files, placed on your computer by a website. Cookies can be read by the website on your subsequent visits. The information stored in a cookie may relate to your browsing habits on the web page, or a unique identification number so that the website can ‘remember’ you on your return visit.

Generally speaking, cookies do not contain personal information from which you can be identified, unless you have furnished such information to the website. This website uses cookies to track usage and help improve features and services of the site.

Statistical and analytical information from cookies provides us with general and not individually specific information about the number of people who visit this website; the number of people who return to this site; the pages that they visit; where they were before they came to this site and the page in the site at which they exited. This information helps us monitor traffic on our website so that we can manage the site’s capacity and efficiency. It also helps us to understand which parts of this site are most popular, and generally to assess user behaviour and characteristics in order to measure interest in and use of the various areas of the site.

How we use Cookies

We collect information on our users through registration and the use of the website, through cookies, where you choose to disclose data in postings, and when you enter sales promotion and competitions.

We use cookies for a number of reasons:

1. To gather statistics. We track how many ‘unique users’ we have and how often they visit our websites. We track how often different pages of our website are visited and which countries our visitors come from. Accurate statistics enable us to sell advertising and continue to provide a top quality service to you.

2. To track advertising response INM and its associated companies and third party advertisers generate statistical cookies to track ad impressions and click-through rates

3. Some cookies enable us to show you adverts that you might be more relevant to you, to control the number of times you see them, and measure how effective the ad campaign has been. We also utilise Google Remarketing in combination with Google Analytics to advertise online. Third-party vendors, including Google, show our advertisements on sites across the Internet. In addition, third-party vendors, including Google, use first-party cookies (such as Google Analytics cookie) and third-party cookies together to inform, optimise, and serve advertisements based on someone’s past visits to our website.

4. Flash cookies may be used to store user preferences for media player functionality and without them some video content may not render correctly.

By using the site you are agreeing to the use of cookies as described.

Cookies we use

There are two types of cookie you may encounter when using this site:

FIRST PARTY COOKIES: these are our own cookies, controlled by us and used to provide information about usage of our site.

The following is a listing of the main cookies used on our site together with brief details of the information they store and for what purpose:

Site performance cookies: This type of cookie remembers your preferences/settings for tools found on an INM site.

Analytics cookies: Every time a user visits our website, web analytics software provided by a third party generates an anonymous analytics cookie. These cookies can tell us whether or not you have visited the site before. Your browser will tell us if you have these cookies, and if you don’t, we generate new ones. This allows us to track how many individual unique users we have, and how often they visit the site. Unless you are signed in to an INM site, these cookies cannot be used to identify individuals; they are used for statistical purposes only. If you are logged in, we will also know the details you gave to us for this, such as username and email address.

Registration cookies: When you register with an INM site, we generate cookies that signal 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 this site, we combine information from your registration cookies with analytics cookies, which we could use to identify which pages you have seen on an INM site.

THIRD PARTY COOKIES: these are cookies found in other companies’ internet tools which we are using to enhance our site, for example Facebook or Twitter, have their own cookies, which are controlled by them.

A lot of the advertisements you see on this site are generated by third parties. Some of these third parties 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. Visitors should be aware that INM is unable to control the use of cookies or the resulting information by other third parties such as advertisers or parties hosting data. These cookies cannot be used to identify an individual; they can only be used for statistical purposes, for example, in providing you with advertisements that are more relevant to your interests.

The companies that generate these cookies have their own privacy policies and INM has no access to read or write these cookies, other than allowing them to be served, we have no role to play in these cookies at all (although we may use statistical information arising from these third party cookies and provided to us by third parties, to improve the targeting of advertisements to users of the website). These third party advertising cookies may be used by those third parties to anonymously target advertising to you on other websites, based on your visit to an INM site.

If you would like to disable “third party” cookies generated by advertisers or providers of targeted advertising services, you can turn them off by going to the third party’s website and getting them to generate a one-time “no thanks” cookie that will stop any further cookies being written to your machine. The following are links to the main third party advertising, analytics, survey and commenting platforms we use, each of which provides instructions on how to do this:

Advertising: 16 trackers

Site Analytics: 4 trackers

Essential: 4 trackers

Social Media: 1 tracker

Customer Functionality: 1 tracker

How to manage your cookies

Most browsers and devices offer settings that allow you to choose whether browser cookies are set and to turn-off and/or delete them. For more information about these controls, visit your browser or device’s help material. Certain parts of the INM services may not work properly if you have disabled browser cookie use and you might see more pop-ups and other intrusive advertising, as we won’t be able to limit what you see using cookies. You will, however, still be able to view editorial content.

Find out more about the use of cookies on www.cookiecentral.com

All modern browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. These settings will typically be found in the ‘options’ or ‘preferences’ menu of your browser. In order to understand these settings, the following links may be helpful, otherwise you should use the ‘Help’ option in your browser for more details.

If you are primarily concerned about third party cookies generated by advertisers, you can turn these off by going to www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/

You can also visit the trade body representing these advertising bodies for more information on how to opt out of these cookies: www.networkadvertising.org/optout_nonppii.asp

Links to other websites

This website may provide links to third-party websites for your convenience and information. If you access those links, you will leave this website. INM is not responsible for the content of external internet sites. We encourage you to review the privacy statement of any company before submitting your personal information.

Stored Information

You may request at any time a copy of the personal information held about you and request its correction or deletion. To obtain a copy of this information, please send an email, including proof of identification, to [email protected]

Upon receipt of your request and within 40 days we will inform you about the type of personal information we hold about you, the purposes for which we hold it and the possible recipients or types of recipients.

INM reserve the right to charge a maximum administrative fee of £10.

Changes to this Statement

If there are updates to the details of this Privacy and Cookie Policy, we will post those changes and update the revision date at the top of this document, so you will always know what information we collect online, how we use it, and what choices you have.

Data Protection in the UK

More information on data privacy rights is available directly from the website of the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Contacting Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Statement and Cookie Policy or you wish to make a complaint, please feel free to contact us through our [email protected]  email or write to us at:

INM Data Protection Officer

INM

Belfast Telegraph House,

33 Clarendon Road,

Clarendon Dock,

Belfast,

BT1 3BG