Privacy policy & cookies
Cookies we set on our own sites
These cookies include:
GOOD_FOOD_COOKIE_ID, JSESSIONID, PHPSESSIONID, and
ASP.NET_SessionId cookies. These cookies are used to
remember things during your session, so we can do things within the
session like logins and personalisation of settings. When you close
your browser, these cookies are deleted.
CarBarState and CarBar
cookies. These cookies are used to track the visual state of the
Car Bar function on the Top Gear site, which can be found on the
Car Chooser section of the site. It contains information about what
you've selected to be shown on the car bar (e.g. models). When you
close your browser, these cookies are deleted.
BBCGWCOOKIE cookie. This cookie is used on
Gardeners World to store the name of the nearest town relevant to
the first part of your postcode if you choose to enter it in the
weather box at the top of the page. This means we can provide you
with the weather where you are each time you access the site.
Version cookie. This cookie is used on
LoveEarth.com, and records which area of the world you are in, so
that each time you use your PC to access the site we can present
you with the correct Love Earth site for your region. This is
because the site is reversioned for more than 10 countries and
languages.
RT_LIVEWORLD, LOG_ID and
PROGRAMME_USER_ID cookies. These cookies are used
on Radio Times to store information about programmes that you may
choose to put into the "your programmes" section of the site if you
decide to use that service, and to display this information to you
each time you log in to the site.
LastVisitedContentPage cookie. This cookie is
used on BBC Sessions so we can track the paths our users follow
through the site. This allows us to improve the site so that it
better meets the needs of the majority of our users, since users
tend to do things in ways we couldn't predict when we wrote the
software. When you close your browser, this cookie is deleted.
Communities Platform cookies. These cookies
enable the functionality of the sign-on and comment sections of
some of our sites (known as the Communities Platform). The cookies
include: TOPGRUK and similar for the relevant
sites, cplat_ultimatereturnURL, cplat_email
cplat_successMessage, EditDetailsPanelQueryStringSuffix,
LoginQueryStringSuffix, RegisterQueryStringSuffix and
ResetPasswordQueryStringSuffix.
Cookies set on our sites by our commercial service providers
We use a range of third party services on our sites, from
statistics packages to advertising, video delivery, content
delivery and even low level, techie functions like load balancing
our servers so they are always available when you want to use them.
Some of these services require the use of cookies to work properly.
These services include:
Statistics
hitBox / HBX / Omniture (Visual Sciences) / Google
Analytics provide anonymised statistical information for
us. They process IP addresses and information from other cookies
used on our sites so we know how many page views we have, how many
users we have, what browsers they are using (so we can target our
resources in the right way to maximise compatibility for the
majority of our users) and, in some cases, in which country, city
or region they are located.
Importantly, this statistical information also allows us to
determine how much we should charge for advertising, and if we are
hitting our target audience. If we didn't have these measurement
tools to enable us to get our sums right on the advertising we
would have less money to spend on improving the sites' content!
Some of the IP address and information from cookies gathered by
these providers is processed by them outside the European Economic
Area (e.g. Omniture (Visual Sciences) processes data in the United
States and we confirm that it satisfies the EU's data protection
requirements).
Advertising (non-targeted)
The advertisements on our sites are served by a number of third
party ad serving providers, including DoubleClick,
Advertising.com, Adviva.net (Specific Media), AdRevolver
(BlueLithium-Yahoo!), 247realmedia.com and Eyeblaster,
amongst others. The cookies accompanying the ads allow them
and their advertisers to monitor the effectiveness of the ads (e.g.
by using statistical analysis cookies) and make the ads more
relevant to you (e.g. if you use our sites from outside of the UK,
you may get ads from your local country). If you would like
more information about the cookies used by the providers listed
above, please see their privacy policies at:
TARGETED ADVERTISING
AudienceScience Inc. (formerly Revenue Science,
Inc.) uses cookies to discover general information about
the pages on our sites that you visit and it also processes IP
addresses to collect other non-personally identifiable information
in order to place you in a "market segment". This includes data
about the country, city or region where you are located and your
domain name (e.g. what ISP you use). It then places advertisements
onto our sites which it believes people in your market segment will
find relevant (see the "Targeted Advertising Update" sidebar in the
BBC Worldwide
privacy policy for more on this type of
advertising).
If you would like more information about the cookies used by
AudienceScience and how to opt out, please see their privacy policy
at: http://audiencescience.com/privacy.asp
Information (IP addresses and information in other cookies on
our sites) that AudienceScience collects is transferred to them in
the United States and we confirm that AudienceScience satisfies the
EU's data protection requirements through its registration with the
US Dept of Commerce's 'safe harbor' framework. Data is also
sometimes shared with AudienceScience's sub-contractors in India
who contractually satisfy the EU's data protection
requirements.
Widgets
Clearspring provides the technology behind the
widgets that are available on some of our sites. The Clearspring
widgets enable us to view similar statistical information to that
referred to under Statistics (see above), and we use it for similar
purposes.
Blogs
Wordpress provides the technology behind the
blog areas of some of our sites. Their
Comment_author_COOKIEHASH cookie is used on to
store your screen name if you choose to submit a comment on a blog.
This means they can pre-fill the screen name field in the comment
submit box the next time you access the site, although you don't
have to use the pre-filled name if you don't want to do so. Their
Comment_author_email_COOKIEHASH cookie is designed
to contain an email address, but since we don't ask you for this
for our blog areas, we put in a dummy one - noreply@bbc.com.
Surveys
We sometimes use third parties to run market surveys on our
sites. These surveys use cookies to work out which users have been
exposed to which content. Companies we use from time to time for
this sort of activity are:
- Dynamic Logic (safecount.net)
- MetrixLab (opinionbar.com)
- Gemius (gemius.com)
E-commerce
24-7 Entertainment AG is the technology
provider behind the e-commerce platform for some of our webpages.
It uses cookies to enable a site to remember items you placed in
your "shopping basket" on the site between page refreshes. When you
close your browser, this cookie is deleted.
Server functions
Because of the scale and size of some of our websites, we have
to use more than one computer to serve pages to all our users
without them having to make a cuppa between page loads. We use
various pieces of equipment and services for this - e.g. load
balancers from Cisco, Akamai's edge caching
service and video services from Brightcove.
For example, Akamai's service allows us to cache - or keep a
copy of - files (images, movies, scripts and the like) at a
location near you. This means that rather than every user,
worldwide, having to download the entire topgear.com homepage from
our server in the UK, some of the files which make up the site -
usually ones which don't change so often - are held for us on
Akamai's servers. Akamai's cookies allow them to redirect the user
- transparently and automatically - to the closest and fastest
server for them without Akamai's system having to spend time
working this out for itself.
General third party opt-outs
You can learn about and opt out of a number of commercial third
party cookies (including some used by BBC Worldwide) at www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp
Some of the opt-outs used by our commercial service providers
require a cookie to be placed on your PC which is only used to tell
the relevant cookie servers not to send you any further
cookies.
SETTING UP YOUR BROWSER TO CONTROL OR DELETE COOKIES
You can find up-to-date information clearly explaining
how to control or delete cookies on your Windows PC or Apple Mac
at www.aboutcookies.org
To control or delete cookies on your mobile
phone, please refer to your handset manufacturer's help
manual.
We use Macromedia Flash Player to deliver certain services on
our sites. To improve user experience, Local Shared Objects - or
Flash Cookies as they are commonly known - are
employed to provide features such as auto-resume or saving
preferences. Flash Cookies are stored on a user's terminal much the
same as cookies are, however it is not possible to manage them at
browser level in the same way.
The Adobe website provides comprehensive information on how to
delete or disable Flash cookies either for a specific domain or for
all websites - see http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/526/52697ee8.html
for details. Please be aware that restricting the use of Flash
Cookies may affect the features available to you for Flash-based
applications on our sites.
Further information
Additional information regarding cookies and opting-out is
available at www.youronlinechoices.co.uk
and www.allaboutcookies.org
Last updated: 18 January 2010