Cookie Notice
1. PURPOSE OF THIS NOTICE
This notice describes what cookies are active on this website, what users they track, for what purpose, where in the world the data is sent and how users may op out or change their setting in regards to the cookies on this website.
2. ABOUT US
Li Fi Tech News is a UK Tech news platform founded in April 2018 by Li Fi Technology enthusiasts. The office is based in London in the United Kingdom. Their mission is to enlighten individuals and bring awareness of the mechanism, potential, applications and benefits of this next generation wireless communication technology called Li-Fi.
For the purpose of Data Protection Legislation and this policy, we are the ‘data controller’. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal data about you. We are required under the Data Protection Legislation to notify you of the information contained in this cookie policy.
We have appointed a GDPR representative. Our GDPR representative is our Data Protection Point of Contact and is also responsible for assisting with enquiries in relation to this cookie policy. Should you wish to contact our GDPR representative Point of Contact, you can do so using the contact details noted at paragraph 11 (Contact Us), below.
3. What is a Cookie?
A cookie is a very small file that is downloaded to a device such as a Smartphone or a computer when a user is visiting a website.
They were created to overcome a limitation in web technology. Web pages are 'stateless', meaning that they have no memory, and cannot easily pass information between each other. So put is simply, cookies provide a kind of memory for web pages.
Cookies allow a user to login on one page, then move around to other pages and stay logged in. They permit users to set preferences for the display of a page, and for these to be remembered the next time you return to it.
Cookies can also be used to watch the pages you visit between sites, which help advertisers to gain an understanding of your interests. Then when you land on a site that shows one of their adverts - they can tailor it to those interests. This is known as 'behavioural advertising'.
Almost every website use cookies in some way or another, and every page you visit in those sites writes cookies to your computer and receives them back from it.
Cookies are incredibly useful as they allow modern websites to work the way people have come to expect – with every increasing levels of personalisation and rich interactive functionality.
However, they can also be used to manipulate your web experience in ways you might not expect, or like. It could be to your benefit, or the benefit of someone else – even a business or organisation that you have never had any direct contact with, or perhaps heard of.
4. The Types of cookies
There are mainly 6 types of cookies:
1. First Party Cookies
First party cookies are only set or retrieved by the website while you are visiting it, so they cannot normally be used to track activity or pass data from one site to another.
However the owner of that website can still collect data through their cookies and use that to change how the website appears to the user, or the information it displays.
Of course they can also collect the data and use it outside their website, and even sell it on to other organisations. However, if they do this it must be explained in the site's privacy policy.
Most desktop browsers allow you to see a list of the cookies that have been set – and they will normally be listed by the host domain value.
2. Third Party Cookies
If the host domain for a cookie is different to the one in the browser bar when it was downloaded, then it is a third party cookie.
They are usually placed in a website via scripts or tags added into the web page. Sometimes these scripts will also bring additional functionality to the site, such as enabling content to be shared via social networks.
For example, if you visit a site that has a YouTube video in one of its pages. This has been included by the website owner, using a piece of code provided by YouTube. YouTube will then be able to set cookies through this code, and know that you have watched that video, or even just visited the page the video is in.
Online advertising is the most common use of third party cookies. By adding their tags to a page, which may or may not display adverts, advertisers can track a user (or their device) across many of the websites they visit.
This allows them to build up a 'behavioural profile' of the user, which can then be used to target them with online ads based around their 'calculated' interests.
Use of cookies for this purpose is often seen as intrusive and an invasion of privacy.
3. Session Cookies
Session Cookies are only stored temporarily in the browser's memory, and are destroyed when it is closed down, although they will survive navigating away from the website they came from.
If you have to login to a website every time you open your browser and visit it - then it is using a session cookie to store your login credentials.
Many websites use session cookies for essential site functions, and to make sure pages are sent to the browser as quickly and efficiently as possible.
4. Persistent Cookies
Persistent cookies are created by giving them an expiry date. If that expiry date is reached, it will be destroyed by the computer. If the expiry date is not set then it is automatically a session cookie.
The expiry date will normally be saved as the time the cookie was first created plus a number of seconds, determined by the programmer who wrote the code for the cookie. However, there is no real limit on the expiry date - so it could be set to be 20 years in the future. In addition, if you revisit the website that served up the cookie, it may automatically place an updated version on your computer - with a revised future expiry date.
If you login into a website, then shut down your computer, start it up again, and go back to the website to find you are still logged in - then it is using a persistent cookie to remember you.
Persistent cookies are also used to track visitor behaviour as you move around a site, and this data is used to try and understand what people do and don't like about a site so it can be improved. This practice is known as Web Analytics. Since Google started providing its own analytics technology free of charge to website owners, almost all websites use some form of it - although there are also paid-for services available to rival Google's.
Analytics cookies are probably the most common form of persistent cookies in use today.
However, persistent cookies can also, oddly, have a shorter life span than some session cookies, as they can be coded to be destroyed within a second or two of being set, whereas a session cookie will always last until you close down your browser.
5. Secure Cookies
Secure cookies are only transmitted via HTTPS - which you will typically find in the checkout pages of online shopping sites.
This ensures that any data in the cookie will be encrypted as it passes between the website and the browser. As you might imagine – cookies that are used by e-commerce sites to remember credit card details, or manage the transaction process in some way, would normally be secure, but any other cookie might also be made secure.
6. HTTPOnly Cookies
When a cookie has an HTTPOnly attribute set, the browser will prevent any client script in the page (like JavaScript) from accessing the contents of the cookie.
This protects it from so-called cross-site-scripting (XSS) attacks, where a malicious script tries to send the content of a cookie to a third party website.
5. Cookies active on Li Fi Tech News website
Li Fi Tech News uses cookies from Squarespace and Google Analytics
Squarespace
Squarespace uses some necessary cookies because they allow visitors to navigate and use key features on the website. These cookies vary from site to site depending on the features it uses.
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Analytics and Performance Cookies
Squarespace use Analytics and Performance cookies to collect information on your behalf about how visitors interact with your site. Storing these cookies is how we populate the data you find in Squarespace Analytics, such as traffic sources, unique visitors, and cart abandonment.
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Google Analytics:
As a user navigates between web pages, Google Analytics provides website owners JavaScript tags (libraries) to record information about the page a user has seen, for example the URL of the page. The Google Analytics JavaScript libraries use HTTP Cookies to "remember" what a user has done on previous pages / interactions with the website.
gtag.js and analytics.js – cookie usage
The analytics.js JavaScript library is part of Universal Analytics and uses first-party cookies to:
- Distinguish unique users
- Throttle the request rate
When using the recommended JavaScript snippet, gtag.js and analytics.js set cookies on the highest level domain they can. For example, if your website address is blog.example.co.uk, analytics.js will set the cookie domain to .example.co.uk. Setting cookies on the highest level domain possible allows users to be tracked across subdomains without any extra configuration.
gtag.js and analytics.js set the following cookies:
The ga.js JavaScript library uses first-party cookies to:
- Determine which domain to measure
- Distinguish unique users
- Throttle the request rate
- Remember the number and time of previous visits
- Remember traffic source information
- Determine the start and end of a session
- Remember the value of visitor-level custom variables
By default, this library sets cookies on the domain specified in the document.host browser property and sets the cookie path to the root level (/).
6. Check your cookies
You can see which cookies are active in your browser’s settings. For help, visit your browser’s documentation:
7. Changes to this Policy Updates
Any changes we may make to our cookie policy in the future will be updated on our website at www.lifitn.com
This cookie policy was last updated on 20th July 2018.