What are cookies?
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site, such as the number of visitors. Most major websites use cookies.
Types of cookies used on our website
Our own cookies, as well as third party cookies, are listed below. If you use our website, you agree to our use of cookies.
‘Strictly necessary’ cookies
Some cookies on our website are essential for us to be able to provide you with a service you have requested. If you prevent these cookies, via your browser for example, we can’t predict how our website will perform during your visit. Some services may stop working.
We use ‘strictly necessary’ cookies for things like:
- online forms
‘Analytics’ cookies
We use analytics cookies to help us understand how users engage with our website. They also allow us to see which features are most popular and make them better, and remove the features that nobody uses. We would find it difficult to analyse how well our website was performing and improve it without these cookies.
These cookies don’t collect any information that could identify you – all the information collected is anonymous and is only used to help us improve how our website works.
We use ‘analytics cookies’ for recording things like:
- the number of visitors to our website
- the type of device used to access our website such as PC, mobile phone or iPad
These are considered non-essential cookies. If you do not accept cookies, these will be disabled.
‘Social sharing’ cookies
We use cookies to allow you to share content directly to social networking sites such as Facebook. These are generally third party cookies set by external companies such as AddThis, Facebook and Twitter.
These are considered non-essential cookies. If you do not accept cookies, these will be disabled.
List of our cookies
Strictly necessary cookies
| Cookie | Name | What does this do? |
|---|---|---|
| Registered members need a cookie to be able to log in. This is ‘strictly necessary’ as WordPress won’t work without it. | wp_set_auth_cookie( $user_id, $remember, $secure ) | Enables administrators to log in to the site. |
Analytics cookies
| Cookie | Name | What does this do? | More information |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics | _utmc _utma _utmz _utmb ga | These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our website. We use the information to compile reports and to help us improve the site. No personal details are recorded. The cookies collect information such as the number of visitors to the site and the pages they visited. | View Google Analytics privacy policy To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites, please visit tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout |
Third party cookies
Some of the cookies used on our website are stored on your machine by third parties. We have no control over these cookies or how the third parties use them.
They are used to allow that third party to provide a service to us, for example maps and photo galleries.
For more information on these cookies and how to disable them, please see the third party’s individual privacy policy listed below.
| Cookie | About the cookie | Name | More information |
|---|---|---|---|
| AddThis | Analytics AddThis provide anonymised data about how many users are sharing content on our website. |
Social sharing
AddThis store cookies which allow the social sharing functionality on social networks such as Facebook
Interest-based advertising
AddThis tools may also collect data for the purpose of interest-based advertising.uid
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btView AddThis privacy policyYouTube We embed videos from our official YouTube channel using YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode. This mode may set cookies on your computer once you click on the YouTube video player, but YouTube will not store personally-identifiable cookie information for playbacks of embedded videos using the privacy-enhanced mode. To find out more, please visit YouTube’s embedding videos information page
View YouTube (Google) privacy policyGoogle maps / Yahoo maps / Bing maps We use Google, Yahoo and Bing maps in our ‘find my nearest’ search facility. We also place Google maps around the site to help people find a venue or service.JSESSIONID
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View Bing (Microsoft) privacy policy
Flash
We use Flash for things like photo galleries and games.
They can be used to store website settings and information (like Flash game scores), to track website behaviour, and to target advertisements.
These cookies can reveal what websites you have visited.
Users can manage Flash cookies via the Adobe Flash Player settings managerFlickrWe have a number of Flickr galleries embedded across our website.
View Flickr (Yahoo) privacy policy
Disable all cookies
For information on how to disable all cookies, visit www.allaboutcookies.org
If you disabled all cookies on our website, some services will not work properly, for example online forms.
More information
Useful information about cookies can be found at www.allaboutcookies.org
If you have a query about our use of cookies, please email smartbelfast@belfastcity.gov.uk
We may update this policy from time to time. We last changed this policy on 27 September 2018.