What are Cookies?
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer, phone or other device by websites that you visit. Similar technologies, such as tags, pixels, beacons or floodlights, will also be referred to as cookies for the purposes of this Policy and our cookie consent banner.
Cookies are widely used to make websites work more efficiently for visitors, to personalise content and advertising, to provide social media features, and to provide information to the website owners about site traffic.
Cookies collect information related to the devices and browser you used to access the internet and your browsing history. In some cases, tags are used to transfer data collected by the website owner about your visit to third parties, e.g. Facebook and Google.
How do we use cookies on our website homeless.org.uk?
At Homeless Link, we aim to minimise the cookies running on our website and we regularly review our cookie usage.
We will use cookies to:
- Enable effective and secure navigation through our websites
- Understand your preferences so that we can personalise our service to you for example present more relevant content
- Monitor, and therefore improve, the effectiveness of our website
- Compile usage statistics so that we can proactively identify ways in which our website and online services can be improved, e.g. by understand which content is in high demand to those we support, we can focus our future content production on those topics
Some of our cookies are session based, which means that they will expire and be deleted when you close your browser, while others are persistent and will remain on your browser or device until either they expire, or you manually delete them from your browser history.
Some cookies are essential because they allow our website to function. Others are analytical cookies or marketing cookies (also known as advanced) you choose your cookie settings for these at the bottom of this page. You can change your cookie preferences for our websites at any time by using the form below. You may need to refresh your page for your settings to take effect.
Cookies currently in use on our website homeless.org.uk
The tables below explain the cookies we use and why.
Functional cookies
Preference cookies enable a website to remember information that changes the way the website behaves or looks, like your preferred language or the region that you are in.
| Name | Owner | Purpose | Expiry | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| analytics_cookie_consent | homeless.org.uk | To detect if the user consented to analytics cookies | 1 year | HTTP |
| cookie_preferences_saved | homeless.org.uk | To detect if the user has set their cookie preferences (ie. to hide the help banner) | 1 year | HTTP |
| third_party_cookie_consent | homeless.org.uk | To detect if the user consented to third party cookies | 1 year | HTTP |
| csrftoken | homeless.org.uk | Necessary to prevent cross-site request forgery | 1 year | HTTP |
Analytics Cookies
Analytics cookies help us to understand how visitors interact with our websites by collecting and reporting information anonymously about how the site is navigated and what features are used. They allow us to measure and improve the performance of our sites, our online services, and our digital advertising campaigns.
| Name | Owner | Purpose | Expiry | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| _ga | Registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website. | 2 years | HTTP | |
| _gat | Used by Google Analytics to throttle request rate | 1 day | HTTP | |
| _gid | Registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website. | 1 day | HTTP |
Third-party cookies
These cookies are set by websites or systems which allow us to embed or integrate with their content - for example videos on a media-hosting site or a sign-up form created by a partner organisation. Since these are not directly under our control, we cannot comprehensively detail every cookie that may be set. Where possible, we will try to restrict cookies on embedded content (for example, using a "no cookie" alternative for YouTube). Known third-party cookies are listed below. Though these are not essential, they are used to improve the visitor experience.