Cookie Policy

The CLA (“we”) use cookies for a variety of purposes, including to ensure that our site functions as expected, to remember your preferences and to gather data about the users of our site and our services.

We are committed to protecting you and any information (anonymous or otherwise) that we collect about you online. This section tells you about how and why we use cookies, and how this allows us to improve our service.

We may use the information we obtain about you through the use of cookies for the following purposes:

• to remember if you’ve set any preferences on our site or whether you have already taken part in a survey;
• to temporarily store data as part of, for example, customer surveys and user questionnaires that we use to provide you with interesting insights and helpful tools;
• to test new content and evaluate its effectiveness;
• to remember if you’ve been informed of our cookies policy, privacy policy and other terms;
• to track you as you navigate our site;
• to improve our site’s usability;
• to ensure you don’t miss information that is relevant to you (including targeting our site’s content, targeting our marketing campaigns and direct marketing emails, targeting our Internet banner advertisements on our website and on other websites);
• to analyze use of our website (including for statistical analysis, sales and marketing research).

We may also combine web usage data with other information we have collected about you. We store this information so that we have a better and more specific understanding of the way users are using our website, and their preferences and interests, for the purposes set out above.

A 'cookie' is a text file that is placed by our server onto your PC, phone or other device into your cookie folder when you visit our site. Your web browser (such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Safari) sends these cookies back to our site on each subsequent visit, unless the cookie is deleted or expires

Cookies themselves do not contain any information which personally identifies you. However, in certain circumstances, we collect personal data about you through these cookies which may include your IP address, information about the way you use our website, your choice of internet browser, the type of device you’re accessing our website from and where you are in the world. Where any information we collect through cookies qualifies as personal data, this cookie policy and our privacy notice apply to the collection and use of such personal data.

Session and Persistent Cookies

Cookies can be ‘session’ or ‘persistent’ cookies, depending on their duration. We use both session and persistent cookies on our site.

A 'session' cookie is allocated to your device only for the duration of your visit to our site, and is deleted once you close the browser session. For example, we use a session cookie to allow you to view member only content within our site – this cookie expires when you close down your browser.

A 'persistent' cookie remains on your device for the period of time specified for that cookie and is activated each time you visit our site, until the cookie expires or is disabled by you.

For example – if you tick the 'Remember Me' box when you log in, a persistent cookie is allocated to your device that allows us to automatically log you into our site when you next visit and limit how often you see particular promotions and announcements on our site.

First and third party cookies

Whether a cookie is a first or third party cookie depends on which website the cookie comes from. First party cookies are those set by or on behalf of our site. All other cookies are third party cookies – these third party cookies are set by third parties and information is collected and used in accordance with their policies. We use both first party and in some special cases third party cookies provided by trusted third parties.

We will ask for your consent to place cookies on your device, except in certain circumstances where cookies are necessary for the transmission of a communication, or where cookies are strictly necessary for us to provide you with a service that you have requested. Please see the sections on ‘strictly necessary cookies’ and ‘functionality cookies’ below for more information about how we use these types of cookies.

We collect and use cookies on our website for the following purposes:

Strictly necessary cookies

These are cookies that are required for the operation of our site. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our site and security cookies to prevent malicious attacks.

These cookies are essential to make our website work correctly and therefore cannot be turned off or rejected. Without these cookies, you would not be able to navigate between pages or use certain vital features of our website. These cookies are strictly necessary for the use of our website and we do not require your consent for use of these particular cookies.

Functionality cookies

These are used to recognize you when you return to our site. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region). Functionality cookies also allow you to log in to our site each time you visit without having to re-enter your details.

Like ‘strictly necessary cookies’, if these cookies are disabled, it could impact your experience to use some of the website’s functionality. These cookies are strictly necessary for the use of our website and we do not require your consent for use of these particular cookies.

Analytics cookies

In order to keep our products and services easy to use and up-to-date, we use web analytics services to help us understand how people use our site. For example we can see which parts of our services are most popular, identify when errors occur and test different versions of a page or feature to see which one works best. We can also recognize and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our site when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our site works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.

These web analytics services may be designed and operated by other companies on our behalf. They do this using small invisible images known as “web beacons” or “tracking pixels” that may be included in the digital products and services on our site. These are used to count the number of times something has been seen. These web beacons are anonymous and do not contain or collect any information that identifies you.

We will obtain your prior consent before using these analytics cookies.

Targeting cookies

These cookies record your visit to our site, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our site and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose.

We will obtain your prior consent before using these targeting cookies.

Email interaction technology

Our emails may contain tracking pixels to tell us whether they are opened and verify any clicks through to links within an email. We (or our marketing service provider on our behalf) use this information to help us understand how an email campaign performed, what types of emails and content our customers find interesting, and what actions people took, so we can improve our email campaigns in the future and make our emails more relevant to you. If you do not wish the tracking pixel to be downloaded onto your device, you should select to receive emails from us in plain text rather than HTML.

Below is a full list of the cookies we use together with a description of what they are used for.

Cookie: _ga

Type: A persistent cookie from Google Analytics which expires after two years.

Purpose: A unique ID representing you.

Cookie: _gid

Type: A session cookie from Google Analytics which expires after 24 hours.

Purpose: A unique ID representing you.

Cookie: _ga_<container-id>

Type: A session cookie from Google Analytics which expires after two years.

Purpose: Used to persist session state.

Cookie: cla_ga_tracking

Type: A persistent cookie which expires 6 months after your last visit to our site

Purpose: A cookie we set which records whether you accept or deny the use of tracking cookies.

Cookie: csrftoken

Type: A persistent cookie which expires after a year.

Purpose: A security cookie to prevent a malicious attack called a cross-site request forgery.

Any questions, comments or requests regarding this cookie policy should be addressed to: privacy@cla.org.uk.