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Cookies
This site uses cookies to customise and improve your experience. This page explains what cookies are, how we use them and how you can control them.
What are cookies?
'Cookies' are small text files that are stored by the browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome etc) on your computer or mobile phone. Websites are able to read and write these files, allowing them to store things such as user preferences. You can think of cookies as providing a 'memory' for the website, enabling it to recognise a user and respond appropriately. Each web domain can only access cookies stored by that specific web domain, meaning that only the THS servers can access the cookies set by the THS domain. Most web pages contain elements from multiple web domains. Therefore when you visit THS, your browser may receive cookies from several sources.
How will disabling cookies change my experience?
Whilst it is important to be aware of the privacy implications of cookies, disabling cookies may negatively impact your online experience by preventing logging in, notifications and customisation.
How does THS use cookies?
A visit to a page on THS may generate the following types of cookie: site performance cookies, anonymous analytics cookies, social sharing cookies, video players and other third party cookies. One cookie is set by our network hardware to provide faster access times and more reliable sessions.
Anonymous analytics cookies
Web analytics software uses cookies to tell if you have visited the site before, determine how many unique users we have and how often they visit the site.
These cookies cannot be used by us to identify individuals, they are used for aggregated statistics only. This allows us, for example, to tell which stories are the most popular and better optimise our content for the interests of our users.
We use Google Analytics and Fasthosts.co.uk Stats to provide our web analytics. Google have their own privacy policy with further information and an opt-out.
Social sharing cookies
To allow users to share THS content with friends through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter we embed components provided by these third parties or build our own components which use their APIs. These third party companies have their own privacy policies (Twitter user privacy policy, Facebook user privacy policy) and also policies for publishers which we will comply with (Twitter API policy, Facebook developer policy).
We deliver several different types of video to users of THS, some appear in the content of stories, whilst others may appear on the homepage or in categories.
Some video components may display video adverts from third parties, such as YouTube, which operate similarly to display advertising but may use flash cookies rather than traditional cookies.
All of the video components we present use cookies for analytics purposes, similar to web analytics. YouTube privacy policies were recently consolidated into a global Google privacy policy.
How do I turn cookies off?
It is usually possible to stop your browser accepting cookies, or to stop it accepting cookies from a particular website. However, you may find that some aspects of THS stop working or work less well if you do this. All modern browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. These settings will typically be found in the 'options' or 'preferences' menu of your browser. In order to understand these settings, the following links may be helpful, otherwise you should use the 'Help' option in your browser for more details.
We do not recommend turning cookies off when visiting THS as some elements will no longer be fully usable and your site performance will be less optimised.
