The Privacy and Cookie Policy of pcbuyerbeware.co.uk

The Privacy and Cookie Policy of the PC Buyer Beware! website

The PC Buyer Beware! website – pcbuyerbeware.co.uk – only interacts with the computers and smartphones of its users in the following two ways that have privacy issues. 1. – By the cookies set by its advertisers. 2. – By requiring an email address to be supplied on its Contact form. Those two areas of any popular website receive spam. Requiring an email address helps to distinguish between genuine communication and spam.

If you don’t know what the cookies used by websites are, the following Wikipedia page provides information on them:

HTTP cookie – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

Google AdSense is currently the only advertiser that uses cookies to provide adverts on pcbuyerbeware.co.uk.

The email addresses of users obtained via comments and messages sent using the Contact form are never used by this website other than for their intended purpose or sold to anyone else.

In short, the PC Buyer Beware! website does not invade the privacy of its users any more than any other website that uses the cookies of leading advertisers to deliver adverts and which make use of a Contact form that requires the input of an email address.

How cookies are used on the PC Buyer Beware! website

By using the PC Buyer Beware! website – pcbuyerbeware.co.uk – unless you choose the rejection option that presents itself along with the acceptance option on the Cookie Consent pop-up, you agree to the use of cookies placed by major advertising networks (currently only Google AdSense that uses several advertising companies) on your computer or smartphone. Unless, of course, you have disabled cookies in the web browser(s) that you use. The Cookie Consent pop-up disappears when a visitor to this website scrolls down the first page. Scrolling down the first page sitgnals the visitor’s acceptance of the use of cookies.

First-party cookies and third-party cookies

The PC Buyer Beware! website – pcbuyerbeware.co.uk – only uses 1 first-party cookie for internal use that makes it possible, for example, for your web browser to remember which pages have been accessed so that the site menu can show that information – and the third-party cookies that its advertisers use.

The revenue received from the adverts keep the website running, because websites have to pay for hosting and the webmaster has to pay for a broadband Internet Service Provider. If these basic costs were not met, the website would cease to exist.

The third-party requests for information from Facebook, Twitter, G+ are not cookies

The third-party requests for information that are detected for this website – they don’t place cookies – come from the social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. – and businesses that provide websites with information about how they are being used so that they can be improved, such as Google Analytics.

Any website that has the code for Google Analytics on its webpages, for example, collects the maximum possible amount of information about the how that website is being used and about the people using it. The kind of information collected is: the web browser and operating system used to access the site, the search terms used to find the site, pages visited, length of time on the site, etc.

For your information, Google AdSense uses its own third-party cookies and may use other third-party cookies of the advertising companies that the company employs to provide targeted, customised advertising. For example, Google achieves providing customised advertising by making use of the personal profiles that it has built up from information obtained from websites that users have previously visited, or from information it has obtained from the free software and services that it provides via Google accounts.

If you are using the Internet in the EU, you can find out about how advertisers use cookies by visiting youronlinechoices.eu. If you are using the Internet in the USA, visit aboutads.info/choices, which allows users to block the ads served by the major advertising companies, including Google.

How Google uses cookies in advertising –

http://www.google.com/policies/technologies/ads/