Cookies Policy

What are cookies?

A cookie is a small text file that a website stores on your computer or mobile device when you visit our Website. It enables the website to remember your actions and preferences (such as login, language, font size and other display preferences), so you do not have to keep re-entering them whenever you come back to the Website or browse from one page to another.

They are also used to optimize your browsing experience and simplify transactions online. Cookies allow us to recognize you every time you visit the Website and to recall personalized settings. This facilitates and improves your browsing experience. Finally, we collect some data on how the Website is accessed to establish anonymised statistics and improve its overall performance in terms of speed and functionality/ease of use.

Essential and non-essential cookies

There are mainly two types of cookies: ‘essential’ cookies and ‘non-essential’ cookies.

  • Essential cookies: are cookies that are essential for our Website to function. They are automatically placed on your computer or device when you access our website to allow you to browse it and to use its main features.
  • Non-essential cookies: are cookies that allow you to personalise your user experience on our Website but are not 100% essential for it to function. They are only placed on your computer or device if you have consented to us doing so.

Session and persistent cookies

These two types of cookies each have different characteristics that can be distinguished and classified according to the length of time for which they are valid and the origin of their placement:

  • Persistent or permanent cookies: remain after a session is closed. They are kept on the Visitor’s hard drive until they expire or until the Visitor deletes the cookies. Persistent cookies are used to collect identification data relating to the Visitor, such as behaviour while surfing the internet or preferences for a specific website.
  • Session cookies: only last for the time taken to visit a website (session). They expire when you close your browser. 
  • First-party cookies: these belong to the site that you choose to visit;
  • Third-party cookies: these are cookies connected with the activity of partner third parties. They are imported from a site the content of which is accessible indirectly, for example via an image or a banner.

If you require further information about cookies in general, please visit www.allaboutcookies.org.

Here below the list of cookies we use on our Website.

  1. Addthis (Advertising cookies) more info on About This – Privacy Information – Privacy Contact
  2. Google AJAX Search APIO (Essential cookies) more info on about Google – Privacy Information – Privacy Contact
  3. Google Custom Search (Essential cookies) more info on about Google – Privacy Information – Privacy Contact
  4. Google Analytics (Analyticscookies) more info on about Google – Privacy Information – Privacy Contact
  5. Hotjar: We use Hotjar in order to better understand our users’ needs and to optimize this service and experience. Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our users experience (e.g. how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users do and don’t like, etc.) and this enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback. Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behavior and their devices (in particular device’s IP address (captured and stored only in anonymized form), device screen size, device type (unique device identifiers), browser information, geographic location (country only), preferred language used to display our website). Hotjar stores this information in a pseudonymized user profile. Neither Hotjar nor we will ever use this information to identify individual users or to match it with further data on an individual user. For further details, please see Hotjar’s privacy policy by clicking on this link. You can opt-out to the creation of a user profile, Hotjar’s storing of data about your usage of our site and Hotjar’s use of tracking cookies on other websites by following this opt-out link.
Google Analytics

Google Analytics cookies are classified as first party cookies as they are set by our website domain, although Google collects and processes information from our use of Google Analytics. To find out more about how Google handles information collected from Google Analytics, see Google Analytics’ privacy policy, which is available here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245.

For information on how Google uses data from cookies it uses, please visit www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/.    

How can you manage cookies?

You can manage and delete cookies as you wish. For details, please visit www.allaboutcookies.org.

Removing cookies from your device

You can delete all cookies that are already on your device by clearing the browsing data and history of your browser. This will remove all cookies from all websites you visited. However, be aware that you may also lose some saved information (e.g. saved login details, site preferences).

Managing site-specific cookies

For more detailed control over site-specific cookies, check the privacy and cookie settings in your preferred browser. Indeed, most browsers allow you to refuse, to accept cookies and to delete cookies. The methods for doing so vary from browser to browser, and from version to version.

Blocking cookies

You can set most modern browsers to prevent any cookies being placed on your device, but you may then have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit our Website or some pages. Blocking some or all cookies will have a negative impact upon the usability of many websites. If you block cookies, you will not be able to use all the features and services on our website. 

Last update on 13 September 2019