Critical Action & Cookies

The law in the UK (and across Europe) with respect to data privacy and cookies was changed in 2011, to help us protect privacy online, and prevent sharing of personal data.

Critical Action’s website is essentially an “information giving” website, so no specific personal information is stored either on our servers or on your PC. Below is our understanding of how our cookies behave; a summary of the cookies we use; plus more detailed information at the foot of the page. You can see that the purposes of our cookies are purely to make your visit to the site more streamlined, and to help us analyse how people navigate through our site. The information stored in our cookies is minimally intrusive/personalised, so we recommend that you either adjust your browser settings or clear the browser history after visiting our site. If you have any specific concerns, please contact us.

Cookie Summary

• Our front page uses a twitter plugin, which sets some cookies, both session and permanent. An IP address is stored for up to a week, and a unique ID is generated for you, stored for up to 2 years.
• We use Google Analytics (GA) to help us judge how well our site structure is working, and whether changes we make to page layout make you more likely to read more or not! Two session cookies are used by GA, and two more permanent cookies are set; one for a unique ID (2 years), and one for recording the search engine result, advert or direct link that brought you to the page (i.e. who referred you to us, so we understand how to best “get our message out ther”.
• If you choose to sign up for email newsletters, we use a service called MailChimp to provide email list management and operation; as you need to sign up for this service, we regard that as consent to have your name and email details stored by them, and their session control cookies set (they contain no personal information).

Cookie Details

Twitter

• k - the cookie called “k” is created by the twitter API to store the user IP address. Expires a week after creation. We regard this as moderately intrusive, user-identifiable, but not personal, data captured in the cookie.
• guest_id - this cookie is used to identify you to twitter via a unique code it generates. Expires 2 years after creation. Theoretically, this code could be used to link past information to any new twitter account you create. We regard this as moderately intrusive, user-identifiable, but not personal, data captured in the cookie.
• _twitter_sess - this cookie is a twitter session cookie (if set). Expires at end of browsing session. We regard this as minimally intrusive, no personal information held.

Google Analytics

• __utma - a unique code is created for each browser that visits the Critical Action site. Expires 2 years after creation. We regard this as minimally intrusive, no personal information held.
• __utmb & __utmc - session control cookies. Expire at end of browsing session. We regard this as minimally intrusive, no personal information held.
• __utmz - this cookies stores the originating link to our site if you chose to click on a direct link on another page, a search result or advert we have placed (for example, a Google AdWords advert). Expires six months after creation. We regard this as minimally intrusive, no personal information held.

MailChimp

• _AVESTA_ENVIRONMENT - this is a session control cookie. Expire at end of browsing session. We regard this as minimally intrusive, no personal information held.