What is a cookie?
A cookie is a piece of information in the form of a very small text file that is placed on your device (computer or smartphone) when you visit the Tickseed site.
A cookie's contents are determined by the specific website that created that cookie. Contents vary from site to site. As a general rule, cookies contain random alphanumeric text characters.
Cookies are intended to help you access a site faster and more efficiently. For example, cookies can store information to help you enter a site without having to login. In effect, cookies tell the website that your browser has been to the site before. It does not need to know your exact identity.
When created, cookies normally don't contain any personal information. They don't scan your computer or do any kind of investigation to find out your personal information. Any personal information they might contain is a result of your own input on a website's form. Most of the time, when a cookie does store personal information, this information is coded in such a way that it is unreadable to any third party who happens to access your cookie folder. The only computer that can read and decode the information is the server that created the cookie in the first place.
Cookies on the Tickseed web site do not contain any of your personal information. They detail the language (e.g. English, French etc) used on the site, the time of your visit etc.
What does a cookie look like?
Below is the content of a typical cookie. This one is from the Hotmail service and has the filename jss@hotmail.msn.txt (.txt is the standard filename extension for text files):
HMP1 1 hotmail.msn.com/ 0 1715191808
32107852 1236821008 29449527 *
The codes will only make sense to Microsoft's MSN Hotmail servers.
This is an example of a cookie from the Tickseed website, the file name will typically be cookie:"your computer":@tickseed.co.uk and it is stored in the browsers temporary files folder.
RefererCookiehttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.tickseed.co.uk%2Fwww.tickseed.co.uk/
921624168666883027494754381004830238746*
store_languageenwww.tickseed.co.uk/
1024 913978752 30312163 543810048 30238746 *
It does not contain any personal information.
Your right to refuse cookies and what happens if you refuse them
You can refuse cookies by activating the relevant setting on your browser. If you carry on using our sites and do not change your browser settings we will assume you consent to us using cookies as described above.
Who We Share The Information With
Tickseed will not sell, distribute or lease any information about you or your visits to our site to anyone (unless we are required to by law).
We only provide your delivery details to our courier or the Royal Mail in order to deliver your order.
History of cookies
Cookies for the internet were originally developed in 1995 by the Netscape Communications Corporation. The word 'cookie' comes from 'magic cookie,' a term in programming languages for a piece of information shared between co-operating pieces of software. The choice of the word cookie appears to come from the American tradition of giving and sharing edible cookies.
What is the purpose of cookies?
Cookies make the interaction between users and web sites faster and easier. Without cookies, it would be very difficult for a web site to allow a visitor to fill up a shopping cart or to remember the user's preferences or registration details for a future visit.
Web sites use cookies mainly because they save time and make the browsing experience more efficient and enjoyable. Web sites often use cookies for the purposes of collecting demographic information about their users (often referred to as analytics data).
Cookies can enable web sites to monitor their users' web surfing habits and profile them for marketing purposes (for example, to find out which products or services they are interested in and send them targeted advertisements) - Tickseed do not use any information collected from analytics data for marketing purposes.
Are there different types of cookies?
Cookies come in different flavours:
Session, or transient cookies
Cookies that are stored in the computer's memory only during a user's browsing session and are automatically deleted from the user's computer when the browser is closed.
These cookies usually store a session ID that is not personally identifiable to users, allowing the user to move from page to page without having to log-in repeatedly. They are widely used by commercial web sites (for example, to keep track of items that a consumer has added to a shopping cart).
Session cookies are never written on the hard drive and they do not collect any information from the user's computer. Session cookies expire at the end of the user's browser session and can also become no longer accessible after the session has been inactive for a specified length of time, usually 20 minutes.
Permanent, persistent, or stored cookies
Cookies that are stored on the user's computer and are not deleted when the browser is closed. Permanent cookies can retain user preferences for a particular web site, allowing those preferences to be used in future browsing sessions.
Permanent cookies can be used to identify individual users, so they may be used by web sites to analyse users' surfing behaviour within the web site. These cookies can also be used to provide information about numbers of visitors, the average time spent on a particular page and generally the performance of the web site. They are usually configured to keep track of users for a prolonged period of time, in some cases many years into the future.
Are cookies dangerous?
No. Cookies are small pieces of text. They are not computer programs, and they can't be executed as code. Also, they cannot be used to disseminate viruses, and modern versions of browsers (e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox / Mozilla) allow users to set their own limitations to how cookies are stored on their system.
Can cookies threaten users' privacy?
Cookies are stored on the computer's hard drive. They cannot access the hard drive - so a cookie can't read other information saved on the hard drive, or get a user's e-mail address etc. They only contain and transfer to the server as much information as the users themselves have disclosed to a certain web site.
