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VWN Legal Issues

Cookie Policy

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files containing a string of characters that can be placed on your computer , mobile device, or any Internet of Things device that can access web servers. They uniquely identify the device and track progress through the site.

What are cookies used for?

Cookies allow a site or services to know if your computer or device has visited that site or service before. Cookies can then be used to help understand how the site or service is being used, and store data between different pages – so that actions you took on one page can be remembered by the next.
Cookies can also help ensure marketing you see online is more relevant to you and your interests.

What Cookies are found here?

We limit our own cookie usage to a type known as session data. This is where possible stored on our server rather than your device, and is set to wipe itself after thirty minutes of inactivity. It is not stored or processed in any way outside of that. It is used to track login status, which menus you currently wish to look at, and in the case of multi-stage resources, which part of the resource you are currently looking at. It does not store usernames, passwords or other personally identifiable information. Additionally, if you close your browser and reopen it, all session data is lost.

We intentionally employ no methods to transfer session data between browser sessions, or user devices, and equally intentionally make no attempt to save any of it or make it available to anyone else. When your visit to our site is done, the cookie information is gone. In most cases it is not even written to a hard drive.

This is more limited than standard cookies, which store their data on your computer semi-permanently, and cannot be used to determine long-term browsing habits. However, this method does a better job of mandating user privacy.

However, we do make use of third party services such as embedded videos and interactive programs. Where possible we strive to make sure these services are stripped free of cookie data. However, this is a very old site, and has a very small dev team, so we cannot guarantee at time of reading that we have found all such resources and either replaced with an alternate version that does not use cookies, or included a note to warn the user that using this resource may subject them to an external site's cookies.

Further, we do not have any control over the content on linked sites, and if we refer you via a link to an external resource, we accept no responsibility for their cookie use.

Please see EU GDPR regulations for further details.

What type of cookie may be found here?
Note: We do not use cookies for any essential site service as outlined above. The site is fully navigable without them, and login services work even if you have turned your browser's ability to use cookies, off.

  1. Necessary Function Cookies:
    A single absolutely necessary cookie is used on this site, solely storing that you have accepted cookies on this site. This is necessary precisely because session data is anonymous and expires after half an hour - it is useless for storing persistent information across multiple days that identifies a specific user. This is what cookies are for.

    This cookie is necessary solely because you have to by law, be given the option to approve or deny cookies, and this is the only viable method to save this choice.

  2. Targetting Cookies
    We do make use of 3rd party services from time to time, and this includes advertisers. These services often include their own cookies. These are not stored on our site, and we have no control over their addition. They may be used by the advertiser to track your browsing habits - what types of sites you visit. Then use this data to display adverts relevant or your presumed interests.

  3. Functionality Cookies
    We do make use of 3rd party services from time to time, and this includes externally hosted resources. This is done where legal or ownership issues prevent a local copy of the resource being stored on our servers, but the resource being too useful to ignore. Most commonly this occurs with video resources. Third party resources are still linked to their local site, and thus to the local functionality cookies.

    These cookies allow the parent site to remember which of their resources individual users have accessed, any in recourse options chosen (such as disabling adverts within video players, or muting the video) or similar content you've ever accessed from their site. The information these cookies collect may be anonymous, it may not, and will likely be used to track your browsing activity on other sites or services that also use the same embed - YouTube or Vimeo videos to name two specific examples.

How long will cookies stay on my device?

The length of time a cookie will stay on your computer or mobile device depends on whether it is a persistent or session cookie. Session cookies will only stay on your device until you stop browsing, or may have expired mid-visit if they are set to a short duration. Persistent cookies stay on your computer or mobile device until they expire or are deleted. It is possible to delete cookies off your device manually, or set your device to never accept cookies. Please seek out relevant instructions for your particular web browser, as each handles this a different way.