Our Cookie and Web Beacon Policy
What are Cookies and Web Beacons?
Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information that are created by a website to track your activity and are saved on your device by your browser.
Web Beacons, also known as web bugs or pixel tags, are snippets of code inserted into web pages that instruct your device to pass information to hosting servers as adjuncts to the downloading and displaying of images. As the associated images are often not required for display, they are frequently rendered to be transparent and as small as possible.
How do we use Cookies?
Our policy in respect of this website (www.havenchurches.org.uk) is only to set cookies on your device that are strictly necessary to enable you to interact with our content. One such cookie may be set in delivering content over which we have full control. It arises through our use of PHP (a recursive acronym for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor), a widely-used open source scripting language that may set a cookie known as PHPSESSID to maintain user session variables. This is termed a first-party session cookie because it is set by the domain you are visiting, is stored in temporary memory and is not retained after your browser is closed. As a strictly necessary cookie it is exempt from any requirement for consent.
Some of our web pages are, however, dependent on content provided through Facebook or Google. who may seek to set other cookies on your device. These are termed third-party cookies because they are set by a domain other than the one you are visiting. Some may be persistent cookies in that they are stored in the permanent memory of your device and will persist until the expiration dates with which they are set, or until you delete them. Persistent cookies can be used to collect identifying information about a user. As described below, we only allow such cookies to be set after you have given your consent which can subsequently be withdrawn at any time. The state of your consent is managed through CookieScriptConsent, a strictly necessary first party persistent cookie.
How do we use Web Beacons?
Our policy is only to include web beacons in our code that support our Legitimate Interest under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in obtaining and processing information that will improve our understanding of how people interact with our website, something that we judge to have a minimal privacy impact and to be what you would reasonably expect us to do. To this end we use CrazyStat open source software to encode one web beacon per page of our website to log your visits and gather other information, such as the browser you are using, the operating system on which its is running and the resolution of your display. Although CrazySat also monitors the IP (Internet Protocol) address assigned to your device, this is anonymized prior to being stored to protect your privacy. We retain the information gathered through these web beacons indefinitely so that we can use it for statistical purposes. As with cookies, Facebook or Google may seek to deploy other web beacons to gather data through those pages that are dependent on content provided through them. As described below, we only allow such web beacons to be deployed after you have given your consent which can subsequently be withdrawn at any time.
Social Media Buttons
In common with many other websites, our pages incorporate buttons to enable you to share content through social networks. Such buttons are frequently created using code provided by the social networks themselves. Such code may include web beacons or cause cookies to be set on your device whenever a page containing such a button is viewed. To protect your privacy, we have built our own sharing buttons to ensure that this does not happen whilst you are viewing our website. No cookies can be set or web beacons deployed by a social network unless and until you click on one of our sharing buttons and thereby open a new window and download code from the social network to which it relates.
Cookie & Web Beacon Consent
A Cookies & Web Beacons Consent Box powered by Cookie Script will appear to the lower left of your screen the first time you visit one of our website pages that is dependent on content provided through Facebook or Google. If you click Yes, thereby agreeing to receive any cookies that may be set and/or web beacons that may be deployed by these organisations, your consent will remain in force for 30 days. You are free to click No, but you will not then be able to view any of the content that is provided through these organisations.
You are free to change your mind at any time. To do so, click on the Cookie & Web Beacon Settings button that will subsequently be present towards the lower left of your screen when viewing any of our pages with content provided through Facebook or Google. The Cookies & Web Beacons Consent Box will then reappear enabling you to remake your selection of Yes or No.
Updated January 2024 to reflect that a Twitter timeline is no longer embedded in the site.
