Cookies and how they Benefit You

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites and are used to record on your computer information the webstie (or plugins inside it) can read. They act somehow as the website's memory in your computer, though it is a very small memory since it can only store 4kb. For an old-style website with only text to read and nothing else to do, cookies were not necessary, but modern interactive and multimedia websites can hardly work without them.

Our cookies help us:

• Make our website work as you'd expect
• If you are a registered user, save you having to login every time you visit the site
• Remember your settings during and between visits
• Improve the speed/security of the site
• Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
• Continuously improve our website for you

We do not use cookies to:

• Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
• Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
• Pass data to advertising networks
• Pass personally identifiable data to third parties

You can learn more about all the cookies we use below.

Granting us permission to use cookies

If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (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 you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.

More about our Cookies

Third party functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is the Facebook "Like" button or a share button. Our site includes third-party cookies (see list at the end). Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.

Anonymous Visitor Statistics Cookies

We use Google 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 which helps to identify when our site isn't working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called “analytics” programs also tell us if , on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before. Google Analytics uses its own cookies for that (see list at the end), you can click here if you want more information about the cookies that Google stores on your computer through this page and many others. Google Analytics does not store any personal information about this website users, it only collects usage information anonymously and the version we use further increases privacy by truncating the IP it collects from you, so your internet connexion cannot be identified either.

Turning Cookies Off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies (Learn how here). Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our's and a large proportion of the world's websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.

It may be that your concerns around cookies relate to so called "spyware". Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with antispyware software.

The cookie information text on this site so far was partly derived from content provided by Attacat Internet Marketing, a marketing agency based in Edinburgh. If you need similar information for your own website you can use their free cookie audit tool.

LIST OF COOKIES THAT MAY BE SET ON YOUR DEVICE WHEN BROWSING MULTIMEDIA-ENGLISH

The data our own cookie collect can only be combined with your personal data if you are registered on our website. In the case of third-party cookies, there can never be a connection between what they collect and your personal data in M-E even if you are a registered user, since we don't share our data with them. Here we offer a list of all the possible cookies that you may get when surfing our website, as mentioned above.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

This website also uses Google Analytics (GA) to understand how our website is being used. GA uses cookies to collect anonymously statistical aggregate datas on user behaviour. These cookies cannot be used to identify specific users. For more information about how Google Analytics works and to opt-out if you wish, read the GA's disclamer here. The Google Analytics cookies used in our website are:

Alternatives to cookies

Apart from cookies, there are two other ways of storing information, but while cookies can be read from the server or client side, these others can only be read from the client side (that means your browser). These are not identified with a name, like cookies, but with the url of the website using it:

- Session Storage: the record lasts only as long as the window creating it is open. When you close the window the recorded information disappears. Data here is never transferred to the server.
- Local Storage: they never expire unless the owner kills it or the user deletes them by clearing the browsing history.

Cookies, session storage and local storage are three different ways for a website to store information in your computer and though the different way they function is interesting for developers, for users they are all basically doing the same: storing information on your computer so the website can fully operate for you as already explained above.

Examining our plugins we have spotted these other instances of storage from third parties:

• Facebook.com: session storage (used by the Facebook comments plugin, where you can write your comments using your own Facebook account)
• Twitter.com: local storage (used by the Twitter share button)
• Youtube.com: both session and local storage (used by Youtube videos)
  

We, Multimedia-English, also use a session storage, which is temporary and it is deleted as soon as you close your browser, as mentioned. The use we make of this storage is really simple. When you enter our website, whether you are a registered user or not, a “session” is created. This session is made up of three pieces of information and they do not identify you, but your browser and your present internet connection. This data is needed, more so if you are not registered, to try to control that what you make on our website comes from a single user and not from multiple people, especially to control the correct functioning of the buttons of “Like” and prevent users from liking the same page multiple times. These are the 3 data making up a session:

ip_address- Your IP is a number which identifies your internet connection at the moment. Since most internet connections have today a dynamic IP, that means that this IP we record will go invalid as soon as your Internet IP changes.
user_agent- A text chain provided by your browser stating the browser version and the kind of device used to browse our site (PC, phone, etc.). This is used, for example, to know if you must be shown our PC or phone version and, when needed, to run an operation differently depending on which browser you are using so it still works the same.
last_activity- The date and time of the last time you accessed our site.

Most of the videos we show on Multimedia-English are embedded from YouTube, and we use a code for that which generates no cookies. Nevertheless, sometimes you can find videos embedded from other sources, having their own set of cookies. The second most common source (the rest are very rare) is DailyMotion, but before playing their videos for the first time (on our website or any other place), and so getting its cookies set, you need to accept their cookie policy and you also get information about it on the spot before you decide to do so.

At the bottom of our website you will find icon links to enter our pages on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but they are simply links to open those other sites. However, next to them you will find other button-plugins to share our content on Twitter and Facebook, and also a “Like” button for Facebook, along with the Facebook Comments Plugin you can find on video pages (so you can make comments using your Facebook account). Those external plugins use cookies or sessions as already described above. Also, if you use the share buttons, the respective external service will open (for example, if you click on the Twitter share button, a window of Twitter will open) and that will take you into that other service with its own privacy and cookies policy.

You can learn more about controlling cookies and increasing your safety and privacy visiting Your Online Choices.