Cookie Policy
What are cookies?
For a website to work properly, it needs to collect certain basic information about its visitors. To do this, a site will create files known as cookies – which are small text files – on your computer, tablet or mobile device.
These cookies are designed to allow the website to recognise you on subsequent visits or to authorise other designated websites to recognise you for a particular purpose.
Cookies do a lot of different jobs which make your experience of the Internet much smoother and more interactive. For instance, they are used to remember your preferences on websites you visit often, your user ID or the contents of your shopping basket, and to help you navigate between pages more efficiently.
They also help ensure that the ads that you see online are more relevant to you and your interests. Some data collected is designed to detect browsing patterns and approximate geographical location to improve user experience.
On this page you will find:
How we use cookies
We may use cookies, web beacons and similar technologies to collect, use and share certain information about your device(s), your use of our websites, app(s) or services, and other unique identifiers personal to you with third-party platforms so that they may target ads to you and to others, based on other information that third party may hold about you.
In some cases, these third-party platforms may also collect some or all of the above information using cookies or similar technologies. Where they do so, the collection, use and protection of your information is governed by those third parties’ privacy policies and practices, and not our privacy policy.
You may be able to opt-out of third-party advertising technologies (including cookies) which remember your browsing habits and try to display relevant ads when you use our websites, app(s) or services by visiting www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices.
If you choose to turn off these technologies, you may still be served ads but they are unlikely to be tailored to your interests.
We don’t store information that could be used to identify you personally, but we do use the information we gather to help improve your experience of our website. For example, they help us to identify and resolve errors, or to determine the most relevant information and services to show you in the future.
What types of cookie are there and which do we use?
Most cookies fall into two different categories:
- first-party cookies which are set by the website you’re visiting and can only be read by that site
- third-party cookies which are set by someone other than the owner of the website you’re visiting.
These cookies can stay on your machine for varying amounts of time, dictated by whether they are:
- a persistent cookie which remain on your device for a set period of time specified in the cookie. They are activated each time you visit the website that created that particular cookie
- a session cookie which are temporary. They allow website operators to link your actions during a browser session. A browser session starts when you open a browser window and finishes when you close the browser window. Once you close the browser, all session cookies are deleted.
Cookies also have, broadly speaking, four different functions and can be categorised as follows:
Essential cookies
Essential cookies are strictly necessary to enable you to move around the website and use essential features. These cookies don’t collect any information that is used to identify you personally. Accepting these cookies is a condition of using this website. If you prevent these cookies, we may be unable to protect your privacy or predict how our website will perform during your visit.
| Name | Purpose | Type | Expires |
|---|---|---|---|
| cookie preferences | This cookie is set by the website based on your preferences and will disable any cookies you have not consented to. | Persistent, First-party | 365 days |
| django_language | This cookie is set by the underlying website framework. When you first access the site, your preferred language is retrieved from the request and stored as a cookie in order to present you with content in a consistent language. | Persistent, First-party | 1 day |
| __cfduid | This cookie is set by CloudFlare. It’s used to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. It does not correspond to any user ID in the web application and does not store any information that could identify you personally. | Persistent, Third-party | 2 weeks |
| csrftoken | This cookie is set by the CSRF protection software in the underlying website framework. A CSRF cookie is a random secret value, which other websites will not have access to. This value is passed back to the website server when you submit any forms on the site, in order to verify the form submission came from an expected source. | Persistent, First-party | 2 weeks |
Performance cookies
Performance cookies collect data for statistical purposes on how you use a website. They don’t contain personal information such as names or email addresses and are used to improve your user experience of a website.
The information collected by our performance cookies includes:
- number of visitors
- length of time spent on the site
- which pages have been viewed
- where visitors have come from
- types of device visitors use.
Information supplied by performance cookies helps us to understand how you use the website. For example, whether you’ve visited the site before, what you looked at or clicked on, and how you found us. We can then use this data to help improve our services and try out different ideas.
We generally use independent analytics companies (such as Google Analytics) to perform these services for us and when this is the case, these cookies may be set by a third-party company and are therefore third-party cookies.
| Name | Purpose | Type | Expires |
|---|---|---|---|
| _one_MTIxNTQw | This cookie is used by an analytics solution called ONE and enables us to track your behaviour across The Brain Tumour Charity website. With this information we can better personalise your experience and provide more relevant information and support. ONE provides its own Javascript tag to capture Web and email interactions | Persistent, First-party | 2 years |
| _one_svr_MTIxNTQw | This cookie is used by an analytics solution called ONE and enables us to recognise and track your behaviour across different The Brain Tumour Charity websites and apps (such as HeadSmart and our online shop). With this information we can better personalise your experience across different sites and provide more relevant information and support. ONE provides its own Javascript tag to capture Web and email interactions | Persistent, Third-party | 2 years |
| _vwo_uuid_v2 | This cookie is set by Visual Website Optimiser (VWO) and is used to measure the performance of different versions of web pages. | Persistent, First-party | 1 day |
| _gid | This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. It’s used to store information about how you use our website and helps create an analytics report of how the website is performing. The data, including the number of visitors, the source they come from and the pages they visit, are collected in an anonymous form. | Persistent, First-party | 1 day |
| _ga | This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. It’s used to calculate visitor, session and campaign data, as well as to track site usage for the analytics report. The cookies store information anonymously and assign a randomly generated number to identify unique visitors. | Persistent, First-party | 2 years |
| _gat | This cookie is installed by Google Universal Analytics to throttle the request rate to limit the collection of data on high-traffic websites. | Persistent, First-party | 1 min |
| _hjClosedSurveyInvites | Hotjar cookie. This cookie is set once a visitor interacts with a Survey invitation popup. It is used to ensure that the same invite does not re-appear if it has already been shown. | Persistent, Third-party | 365 days |
| _hjDonePolls | Hotjar cookie. This cookie is set once a visitor completes a poll using the Feedback Poll widget. It is used to ensure that the same poll does not re-appear if it has already been filled in. | Persistent, Third-party | 365 days |
| _hjMinimizedPolls | Hotjar cookie. This cookie is set once a visitor minimizes a Feedback Poll widget. It is used to ensure that the widget stays minimizes when the visitor navigates through your site. | Persistent, Third-party | 365 days |
| _hjDoneTestersWidgets | Hotjar cookie. This cookie is set once a visitor submits their information in the Recruit User Testers widget. It is used to ensure that the same form does not re-appear if it has already been filled in. | Persistent, Third-party | 365 days |
| _hjIncludedInSample | Hotjar cookie. This session cookie is set to let Hotjar know whether that visitor is included in the sample which is used to generate funnels. | Persistent, Third-party | 365 days |
| _hjShownFeedbackMessage | This cookie is set when a visitor minimizes or completes Incoming Feedback. This is done so that the Incoming Feedback will load as minimized immediately if they navigate to another page where it is set to show. | Persistent, Third-party | 365 days |
| _hjid | Hotjar cookie. This cookie is set when the customer first lands on a page with the Hotjar script. It is used to persist the Hotjar User ID, unique to that site on the browser. This ensures that behavior in subsequent visits to the same site will be attributed to the same user ID. | Persistent, Third-party | 365 days |
| _hjRecordingLastActivity | This should be found in sessionStorage (as opposed to cookies). This gets updated when a visitor recording starts and when data is sent through the WebSocket (the visitor performs an action that Hotjar records). | Session, Third-party | n/a |
| _hjTLDTest | Hotjar cookie. When the Hotjar script executes we try to determine the most generic cookie path we should use, instead of the page hostname. This is done so that cookies can be shared across subdomains (where applicable). To determine this, we try to store the _hjTLDTest cookie for different URL substring alternatives until it fails. After this check, the cookie is removed. | Session, Third-party | n/a |
| _hjUserAttributesHash | User Attributes sent through the Hotjar Identify API are cached for the duration of the session in order to know when an attribute has changed and needs to be updated. | Session, Third-party | n/a |
| _hjCachedUserAttributes | This cookie stores User Attributes which are sent through the Hotjar Identify API, whenever the user is not in the sample. These attributes will only be saved if the user interacts with a Hotjar Feedback tool. | Session, Third-party | n/a |
| _hjLocalStorageTest | This cookie is used to check if the Hotjar Tracking Script can use local storage. If it can, a value of 1 is set in this cookie. The data stored in_hjLocalStorageTest has no expiration time, but it is deleted immediately after creating it so the expected storage time is under 100ms. | Session, Third-party | n/a |
Functionality cookies
Functionality cookies are used to anonymously recognise you, so you’re able to use certain on-site functionality, such as live chat, watching a video or taking a donation payment. They are also used to remember your preferences or settings when you return to our site, so that we can provide you with a more personalised experience. We use a mix of first-party and third-party functionality cookies.
| Name | Purpose | Type | Expires |
|---|---|---|---|
| whoson | This cookie is associated with our live chat software service – Whoson. The service enables you to engage with our Support and Information team via text-based chat while you’re on The Brain Tumour Charity website. It stores a unique identifier to recognise you on return visits. | Persistent, First-party | 1 day |
| __stripe_mid | Stripe uses this cookie to remember who you are and enables the website to process payments without storing any credit card information on its own servers. | Persistent, First-party | 2 weeks |
| _stripe_sid | Stripe uses this cookie to remember who you are and enables the website to process payments without storing any credit card information on its own servers. | Persistent, First-party | 2 weeks |
Targeting or advertising cookies
Advertising cookies are used to deliver adverts and marketing that is more relevant to you. They can also limit the number of times you see a particular ad and measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign by tracking clicks.
If you switch these cookies off, the ads you encounter online will be less relevant to you and your interests.
They are usually placed by third-party advertising networks with a website operator’s permission, but can be placed by the operator themselves. They can remember that you have visited a website, and this information can be shared with other organisations, including other advertisers. They cannot determine who you are though, as the data collected is never linked to your profile.
The main ways we use advertising cookies are set out below:
- Interest-based advertising (or online behavioural advertising) is where cookies are placed on your device by our third-party service providers. These remember your online browsing activity and group together your interests in order to provide you with targeted advertisements which are more relevant to you when you visit thebraintumourcharity.org. Your previous browsing activity can also be used to infer things about you, such as your demographics (age, gender etc). This information may also be used to make the advertising on headsmart.org and askBRIAN.org more relevant to you.
- ‘Retargeting’ is a form of interest-based advertising that enables us to show you ads based on your online browsing activity away from our website. This allows companies to advertise to people who previously visited their website. These cookies will usually be placed on your device by third-party advertising networks.
- Social media cookies help us advertise our products and services to members of our community who are on social media, for example, promoting our support services or fundraising events. These cookies help social media operators (Facebook for example) recognise users who have visited The Brain Tumour Charity website and serve them adverts on our behalf. We participate in Facebook’s Custom Audience and Lookalike Audience programmes so that you can receive relevant ads from us when you use Facebook, and so that we can raise awareness among other Facebook users who share similar interests to you. We provide personal information such as your email address to Facebook to enable them to determine if you are a registered account holder with Facebook. Our adverts may then appear when you access Facebook and on your Facebook feed. Your data is sent in an encrypted format that is deleted by Facebook if it does not match with a Facebook account. For more information please read the Facebook Business page about Custom Audiences and Facebook’s Data Policy.
| Name | Purpose | Type | Expires |
|---|---|---|---|
| _gcl_au | Used by Google AdSense for experimenting with ad efficiency across websites that use their services. | Persistent, First-party | 1 week |
| fr | This cookie is set by Facebook to show relevant advertisements to you, as well as measure the success of the ads and, where possible, improve them. It also tracks your behaviour across the Internet on websites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin installed. | Persistent, Third-party | 1 week |
| _fbp | This cookie is set by Facebook to deliver advertisements when you access Facebook or other digital platforms powered by Facebook advertising after visiting this website. | Persistent, Third-party | 1 week |
How to turn off cookies
You should be aware that any preferences will be lost if you delete all cookies and many websites will not work properly or you will lose some functionality. We do not recommend turning cookies off when using our website for these reasons.
Most browsers accept cookies automatically, but you can alter the settings of your browser to erase cookies or prevent automatic acceptance if you prefer. You change these settings by visiting the “options” or “preferences” menu of your browser.
Generally, you’ll be able to:
- see what cookies are installed on your device and delete them individually
- block third-party cookies or cookies from particular websites
- choose to accept all cookies
- choose to reject all cookies
- turn on notifications for when a cookie is issued.
You can check the following links for more browser-specific information.
- Cookie settings in Internet Explorer
- Cookie settings in Firefox
- Cookie settings in Chrome
- Cookie settings in Safari for Macs and iOS