About our Cookies

Use of ‘cookies’

We want to ensure that all IDS websites and services are easy to use and reliable. This sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your computer, including small files known as cookies. These files cannot be used to identify you personally.

These pieces of information are used to improve our services for you by, for example:

  • enabling a site to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information several times during one task
  • recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested
  • measuring how many people are using our sites, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are fast

How you can control cookies

You can control and/or delete cookies as you wish – for details, see AboutCookies.org. You can delete all the cookies already on your computer and you can set most browsers to block them being placed. But if you do this, you may have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit the site.

How we use cookies

Several cookies are set by our web servers to ensure that your session is maintained for the duration of your visit (until you close your web browser), to help the site remember your settings and preferences (so you don’t have to keep re-entering them whenever you come back to us) and to help us to diagnose and improve the website.

We also use cookies set by Google Analytics which allow us to measure visitor numbers and website usage. Again, these cookies do not identify you personally but simply assist IDS with trends of web pages being read and influencing new content and improved visitor usability. (The particular cookies used for this are: _utma, _utmb, _utmc, _utmv and _utmz.)

For further details on the cookies set by Google Analytics, please refer to the Google Code website.