This page contains information on what cookies are, the cookies used by the fine designs website, how to switch cookies off in your browser, how to specifically switch off advertising cookies, and some useful links for further reading on the subject. If it does not provide the information you were looking for, or you have any further questions about the use of cookies on the fine designs website, please email [email protected].

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are stored by the browser (for example, Internet Explorer or Safari) on your computer or mobile phone. They allow websites to store things like user preferences. You can think of cookies as providing a ‘memory’ for the website so that it can recognize you when you come back and respond appropriately.

How does the Fine Designs website use cookies?

A visit to a page on the Fine Designs website may generate the following types of cookie:

Site performance cookies
Google analytics cookies

Site performance cookies

This type of cookie remembers your preferences for tools found on the Fine Designs website, so you don’t have to re-set them each time you visit.

Google analytics cookies:

Every time someone visits our website, software provided by another organization generates a “Google analytics cookie”.

These cookies can tell us whether or not you have visited the site before. Your browser will tell us if you have these cookies and, if you don’t, we generate new ones.

This allows us to track how many individual users we have, and how often they visit the site.

Unless you are signed in to the Fine Designs website, we cannot use these cookies to identify individuals. We use them to gather statistics, for example, the number of visits to a page. If you are logged in, we will also know the details you gave to us for this, such as your username and email address.

The companies that generate these cookies have their own privacy policies, and we have no access to read or write these cookies. These organizations may use their cookies to anonymously target advertising to you on other websites, based on your visit to the Fine Designs website.

Other third-party cookies

On some pages of our website, other organizations may also set their own anonymous cookies. They do this to track the success of their application, or to customize the application for you. Because of how cookies work, our website cannot access these cookies, nor can the other organization access the data in cookies we use on our website.

For example, when you share an article using a social media sharing button (for example, Facebook) on the Fine Designs website, the social network that has created the button will record that you have done this.

How do I turn cookies off?

It is usually possible to stop your browser accepting cookies, or to stop it from accepting cookies from a particular website. However, we cannot tell if you are signed in without using cookies, so you would not be able to post comments.

All modern browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. To understand these settings, the following links may be helpful, or you can use the Help option in your browser for more details.

Cookie settings in Internet Explorer
Cookie settings in Firefox
Cookie settings in Chrome
Cookie settings in Safari web and iOS.

If you are primarily concerned about third party cookies generated by advertisers, you can turn these off by going to the Your Online Choices site.

You can also visit the trade body representing these advertising platforms for more information: Network Advertising Initative.

They have provided a site where you can control all third-party online advertising. Please note that there are many more networks listed on their site than those that we actually use on Fine Designs.

Useful links

If you would like to find out more about cookies and their use on the Internet, you may find the following links useful:

Microsoft Cookies guide
All About Cookies

The IAB has provided the following website to give information specifically about privacy issues around Internet advertising:
youronlinechoices.co.uk/uk

For further legal information about privacy issues, you may find these links useful:

Data Protection Act 1998
The Information Commissioner’s Office

If you would like to contact us about cookies please email us at [email protected].