Effective Date: March 1, 2020
Last Updated: March 2, 2020
Why Cookies are Beneficial to You
Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience that we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.
Cookies help us to:
- Make our website work as you’d expect.
- Remember your settings during and between visits.
- Offer you free services and content (thanks to advertising).
- Improve the speed and security of the site.
- Allow you to share pages with social networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
- Continuously improve our website for you.
We do not use cookies to:
- Collect any personally identifiable information (without your documented consent).
- Collect any sensitive information (without your documented consent).
- Pass personally identifiable third parties.
- Pay sales commissions.
Granting Us Permission to Use Cookies
If the settings on your browser are adjusted to accept cookies, we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site and all sites, you can learn how to do this below. However, doing so will likely mean that our site, and many other sites, will not work as you would expect.
More About Our Cookies
WEBSITE FUNCTION COOKIES
Our Own Cookies
We use cookies to make our website work including:
- Allowing you to add comments to our site.
- Remembering if we have already asked you questions (e.g. the subscription pop up).
There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.
Social Website Cookies
So you can easily “like” and share our content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
Cookies are set by the social networking sites.
The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.
Anonymous Visitor Statistics Cookies
We use cookies for analytics to compile visitor statistics, such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g., Mac or Windows), how long they spend on the site, what pages are viewed, etc. This helps us to continually improve our site. The analytics programs also tell us , on an anonymous basis, how many people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine or social network) and whether they have been here before.
Advertising Cookies & Affiliate Advertising
I use a number of methods to earn income from this website. If you’d like more information on how this website is monetized, please read my earnings disclosure.
In order to track advertising, a number of external parties will set a cookie so they can reward me for a click or sale.
Neither us, the advertisers, or our advertising partners can gain personally identifiable information from these cookies. We only work with advertising partners who have the highest privacy standards.
Banner Ads
We fund our site by showing ads as you browse our site. These ads are usually managed by a partner specializing in providing ad for multiple sites. Invariably these partners might place cookies to collect anonymous data about the websites you visit so they can personalize the ads to you, ensuring that you don’t see the same ads too frequently, and ultimately report to advertisers on which ads are working.
Turning Cookies Off
You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies (click here to learn how). Doing so, however, will likely limit the functionality of our website and a large proportion of websites across the internet, as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.
If you are concerned that cookies are related to spyware, rather than switching off cookies, you can use anti-spyware software which will automatically delete cookies considered to be invasive.