Cookies and how they benefit you

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience. ‘Cookies’ are small text files that are stored by the browser (e.g. Chrome, Edge or Safari) on your computer or mobile phone. They allow websites to store such things as user preferences. You can think of cookies as providing a “memory” for the website, enabling it to recognise a user and respond appropriately.

How does stlukesmaidstone.church use cookies?

Our cookies help us:

• Make our website work as you’d expect
• 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
• Pay sales commissions

A visit to a page on stlukesmaidstone.church may generate the following types of cookie:

1. Our own cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

• Remembering if you have accepted our terms and conditions
• Allowing you to add comments to our site

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

2. Site performance cookies

This type of cookie remembers your preferences for tools found on stlukesmaidstone.church so you don’t have to reset them each time you visit.

Examples include:

• volume settings for the YouTube video player
• video streaming speeds that are compatible with your browser

Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties

3. Anonymous analytics cookies

Every time a user visits our website, web analytics software provided by a third party generates an anonymous analytics cookie.

We use cookies 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 how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before.

It is important to remember that these cookies cannot be used to identify individuals; they are used for statistical purposes only.

3. Social Website Cookies

So you can easily “Like” or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site.

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.

How do I turn cookies off?

It is usually possible to stop your browser accepting cookies, or to stop it accepting cookies from a particular website.

All modern internet browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. These settings will typically be found in the ‘options’ or ‘preferences’ menu of your browser. In order to understand these settings, the following links may be helpful, otherwise you should use the ‘Help’ option in your browser for more details.

Cookie settings in Internet Explorer
Cookie settings in Firefox
Cookie settings in Chrome

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.

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

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

Data Protection Act 1998
The Information Commissioner’s Office