This Cookie Notice (“Notice”) sets out how Cruelty Free International (“we”, or “us”) uses and categorizes cookies and other tracking technologies through our website (www.crueltyfreeinternational.org). We are committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected, and this website respects the extent of your consent given via our Cookie Settings page, or the cookie banner which is displayed on the page when you visit our website. This Cookie Notice should be read alongside our Privacy Notice, which explains how we use personal information more broadly.
What is a cookie and why do we use them?
Cookies are small text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website. These cookies are then sent back to the website on each time visit, or to another website that recognises that cookie. Cookies serve the purpose of making our website function in more user friendly and effective ways, and in order to tailor the website operations to your needs and preferences, analyze website usage and generally improve your online user experience.
Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user, and remember their preferences, in some cases allowing the sites to tailor the content displayed to the user’s to match interests.
Although this notice refers to the general term ‘cookie’, it also applies to similar tracking technologies that we use (such as ‘web beacons’, ‘clear GIFs’ and ‘pixel tags’).
You can find more information about cookies on the ICO website or at www.allaboutcookies.org.
Types of cookie
There are two broad types of cookies:
- First party cookies: these are cookies that are served directly by the website you are visiting to your computer and are often used to recognise the user when they revisit that site and to remember their preferences as you browse the site. Basically, these are our cookies.
- Third party cookies: these are installed by parties other than the owner of the website a user visits. We use third party cookies for functionality, performance/analytics, advertising and social media purposes.
In addition, cookies may be either ‘session cookies’ or ‘persistent cookies’. Your computer automatically removes session cookies once you close your browser. Persistent cookies will survive on your computer until an expiry date, specified in the cookie itself, is reached. We use both session and persistent cookies.
Wherever it is practical to do so, we use anonymous cookies. These are cookies that allow us to understand how you use our website but without capturing any information that could be used to identify you – all we can tell is that ‘someone’ visited our site and visited a certain page(s), this is vital in helping us improve unpopular content, promote popular content and produce more of the content you like.
Where a cookie does capture information, such as IP address, that can identify you; and where the cookie is not essential for you to be able to use our website, we ask for your consent before placing the cookie on your device.
Some cookies are essential for the effective functioning of the website. We are unable to offer you the option to opt-out from these cookies due to this essential nature.
What category of cookies do we use?
We may use the following types of cookies:
- Essential Website Cookies: these cookies are essential to provide you with the website and its services. Without these cookies, services such as donation pages or secure shop purchases would not be possible.
- Functionality Cookies: these cookies remember choices made by or attributes of the user and enhance the features and content you experience during your visit to our website, e.g. language, appeals visited or user’s location. This cookie is also used to remember a user’s preferences for font size or customisable parts of a web page.
- Analytics and Performance Cookies: we use performance/analytics cookies to analyse how the website is accessed, used, or is performing in order to provide you with a better user experience and to maintain, operate and continually improve the website. These cookies do not collect information that identifies the user.
- Advertising and Tracking Cookies: these cookies collect information about the users’ browsing habits. This may also include your use of social media sites, e.g. Facebook, etc. or how you interact with our website which then shows you relevant content elsewhere on the internet. NB. These may also be used to choose the advertisements that are displayed to you on our website and other websites.
- Social Media Cookies: on some pages of our website, third parties that provide applications through our website may set their own cookies in order to track the success of their applications or customise applications for you. Some pages of our website may also contain embedded content.
Which cookies do we use?
The tables below provide more information about the cookies we use and why.