Understanding Our Use of Cookies
Cookies are essential for the provision of our services to you. Cookies help us to distinguish you from other users of our service. They are necessary to provide you with access to our course content and help us to keep your user account secure, safeguarding your identity and privacy. Cookies also help us to provide you with a seamless and personalised user experience, alongside providing us with the analytics to improve our platform and course content.
What Are Cookies and How Are they Stored?
A cookie is a small file consisting of letters, numbers and symbols that we store on your device with your consent. Temporary (‘session’) cookies are kept on your device for the duration of your visit and are deleted when you leave our site. Persistent cookies have a longer life cycle and remain on your device between visits. They help us to identify you and apply your preferences at your next visit. We use both types of cookie to provide our services to you.
Understanding the Types of Cookie that We Use
We use the following types of cookie:
- Strictly necessary cookies are required for the correct operation of our service. The information we store provides you with access to your user account, it helps us protect your identity and personal data from unauthorised disclosure, it enables us to deliver our courses to you and it ensures the correct behaviour of our payment and subscription systems to minimise fraudulent activity.
- Functionality cookies are used to recognise you throughout your current and future interactions with our service. This enables us to personalise the content we deliver to you, greet you by name and remember your preferences, e.g. your choice of language and currency.
- Analytical/performance cookies help us to understand how customers navigate and interact with our services. They provide us with information to guide improvements to our service, for example, by helping us to ensure that users always find what they are looking for with minimal effort, and to ensure that the site continues to operate in the most efficient and user-friendly way. Data collected from this type of cookie is aggregated prior to analysis to help us protect your identity and respect your privacy.
- Targeting cookies record your interactions with our services, the pages that you have visited and the links that you have followed. We use this information to make our service and any advertising displayed more relevant to your interests. We share this information with our commercial partners to provide some of the services we manage on their behalf. If you have given your explicit consent we may share this information with selected third parties when their products or services are likely to be of interest to you.
Third Party Cookies
In addition to our own cookies we use third party cookies to provide a number of features, including the reporting of usage statistics, the implementation of helpdesk features and the management of your interactions with social media. Third party cookies are usually of the analytical/performance or targeting types. We do not have control over the use of data collected through third party cookies, the cookie and related policies of the third-party service provider determine how this data is used and shared.
Protecting Your Privacy
We take privacy extremely seriously and we are fully committed to managing all the data we hold on you in a transparent and responsible manner. For further information on the data we collect on you, and how it is stored, processed and analysed, please refer to our Privacy Policy.