Cookies
What are cookies and how do they work?
Cookies are small bits of text that are downloaded to the devices you use to browse the NEC Group’s websites. Your browser makes these cookies available every time you visit the website again, so it can recognise you and can then tailor what you see on your device. Cookies are an important part of the internet. They make using devices and accessing online information much smoother and affect lots of the useful features of websites. There are many different uses for cookies and other tracking categories, but they fall into six main groups:
1. Cookies that are needed to provide the content, product or service you have asked for (Essential Website Cookies)
Some cookies are essential to help your devices log-in and purchase tickets, or so you can move around websites and use their features. Without these cookies, content, products or services you've asked for can't be provided.
Here are some examples of essential cookies:
- Positioning information on a smartphone screen, tablet device or other screen so that you can see the website and use its functionality.
- When you add something to the online shopping basket, cookies make sure it's still there when you get to the checkout.
- Some are session cookies which make it possible to navigate through the website smoothly.
2. Improving your browsing experience (Enhanced Functionality Cookies)
Cookies allow the application or website to remember choices you make, such as your language or region and they provide improved features.
Here are a few examples of just some of the ways that cookies are used to improve your experience on our applications and websites:
- Remembering your preferences and settings, including marketing preferences.
- Remembering if you've filled in a survey, so you're not asked to do it again.
- Remembering if you've been to the application or website before.
- Showing 'related article' links that are relevant to the information you're looking at.
- Remembering your login credentials so you don’t need to log in every time you return to the website
3. Analytics Cookies
We like to keep track of what websites, information and links are popular and which ones don't get used so much, to help us keep our information relevant and up to date. It's also very useful to be able to identify trends of how people navigate (find their way through) our information and when and where 'error messages' may originate.
This group of cookies, often called 'analytics cookies' are used to gather this information. The information collected is grouped with the information from everyone else’s cookies. We can then see the overall patterns of usage rather than any one person’s activity. Analytics cookies are used to improve how an application, a website and its pages work.
4. Other tracking technologies
Our applications, web locations, websites and communications you get from us contain small invisible images known as 'web beacons' or ' pixels'. These are used to manage the interaction between you and the online information or email and allow us to assess the effectiveness of the communication.
5. Affiliate cookies (Advertising (Targeting) Cookies)
We use 'affiliate' cookies. Some of our web based information will contain promotional links to other companies’ sites. If you follow one of these links and then register with or buy something from that other site, a cookie is used to tell the other site that you came from one of our sites. That other site may then pay us a small amount for the successful referral. Note that when you visit those other companies’ sites, they will have their own privacy notices which set out what personal data they collect and how they will use it.
6. Third-party cookies (Advertising (Targeting) Cookies)
Some cookies are used and provided by third-party sources. The table below outlines which third-party cookies are used on each of our sites.
7. How can I disable or block cookies?
When you first visit an NEC Group page, you will be asked to set your cookie preferences. After these have been set, you can change these at any time by visiting the ‘Cookie Settings’ page, which can be accessed from the footer of all of our sites.
July 2020