Privacy & Cookie Policy

Your Privacy

I value your privacy. I do not collect any personal information on this website without your permission.
Any information you provide is treated as confidential in accordance with applicable Irish data protection legislation and with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 2016.
Personal information requested by online forms shall only be used for the purpose set out on that online form.
I will not share your personal information with any third party (unless legally bound to do so).


Cookies

Some features of this website require cookies to work properly.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files, saved by the browser onto your computer.  They either store settings or else an identifier (a string of letters and numbers), which can be read by the server each time the browser requests a webpage.  They allow the web server to know how you want it to behave (e.g. don't load the chatbot) and lets it know that you are the same user who, for example, logged into the previous page (so that it won't ask you to sign in again,  on the next page).  Cookies may be used to collect non-personal information about how visitors use our website.

If a cookie does not contain an expiration date it is referred to as a temporary session cookie. Temporary session cookies are stored in memory and never written to disk, when the brower closes the cookie is permanently lost from this point on. Temporary session cookies may be used in some areas to enable specific functionality.

If the cookie contains an expiration date, it is considered a persistent cookie. On its specified expiration date, the cookie will be removed from the disk. Persistent cookies may be used to remember your preferences (e.g. preferred text size) the next time you visit. These cookies exist on your computer for a set number of days after you have visited but they contain no private or sensitive data.

How this site uses Cookies

I only use temporary cookies if they are necessary for the site to work. Typically these are only needed in areas of the website where you need to log in.

I also use the following types of persistent cookies:

  • I use cookies as part of Google Analytics, a web analytics service that allow us to see how visitors use our website.  Google analytics allows us to discover things like the number of visitors to the site; most popular pages, entry-points and exit-points; average page load times; types of browsers used; and the number of mobile devices vs PCs.  This information helps us improve our website.
    Your current analytics cookies are:
    No analytics cookies in use
  • Functionality cookies are required for some online features (e.g. a chatbot, if I had one) to work.  Embedded content from social media or video sharing platforms may also require cookies to behave optimally.
    Your current functionality cookies are:
    No functionality cookies in use
  • Essential Cookies: I'm using 5 cookies to ensure we're complying with EU cookie law. They store whether you have specified your cookie consent preferences, in the last 6 months, and whether you ticked each of the 4 cookie category checkboxes. This is how the website remembers whether to ask you about cookies and what your current cookies settings are.
    Your current essential cookies are:
    No essential cookies in use

In the future, I may also use persistant cookies for the following purposes (but right now, I have no plans to do so):

  • Cookies can also store your preferences for a website (e.g. whether to use a dark or light colour scheme).
    Your current preference cookies are:
    No preference cookies in use
  • Marketing cookies allow sites to track and manage their online ads.  They help advertisers see how successful their ad campaigns were and can also assist in targeting ads when you are on a site that they advertise on (e.g. when you're next on Facebook, it may see, from a marketing cookie, that you've been to a particular online store's website, and then show their advertisement instead of any other store's).
    Your current marketing cookies are:
    No marketing cookies in use

Setting your cookie preferences


You can manage your cookie preferences (for this website) at any time.  Desktop users can also invoke the cookie manager, anywhere on the website, by pressing Ctrl-M (PC) or Command-M (Mac) on their keyboard.  Your cookie preferences will be valid for 6 months (the maximum time allowed under EU law).  After this time has elapsed, the website will ask you to set your cookie preferences again.

3rd-Party Cookies

Some cookies, present on my site, are not related to me: any cookies made by embedded content from Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, for example. I do not have any control or influence on the operation of these third party cookies, so you may want to check these sites' individual cookie policies.

If you have not consented to functionality cookies, this website will not add them, but it may not always be able to prevent embedded content, from other websites (such as Videos and Social Media Feeds) from automatically adding some.  Also, if you click on a link to a video in this website, or on a social media feature, that video hosting / social media platform may add cookies to your computer in order to carry out your requested action.

These 3rd party sites will also ask you for your cookie preferences when you visit them, seperately, but if you are concerned about third-party cookies, you could always configure your browser not to accept them.  More information on this can be found at howtogeek.com.