Cookie Policy / Do not Sell my Info

CCPA – California Residents

We are not in the business of selling data and never record personally identifiable information (PII). Obviously, if you use contact forms or join a list, then that information is used for contact or update purposes only. There are no surprises and your permission is needed to complete data entry on all forms.

Cookies In Use on This Site

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

The cookies help us:

  • Make our website work as you’d expect – performance being key.
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Continuously improve our website for you
  • Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping me to write content aimed at the correct audience)

We do not use cookies to:

  • Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission) – our contact form, for example.
  • 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

Website Function Cookies

Our own cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

  • Allowing you to add comments to our site
  • Allowing you to complete and submit contact forms

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set and if it’s a problem, we’re sorry to see you leave.

Third party functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following which use cookies:

CleanTalk–Used to prevent spam on our comments and forms and acts as a complete anti-spam solution and firewall for this site. Cookies produced include (apbct_cookies_test, apbct_page_hits, apbct_prev_referer, apbct_site_landing_ts, apbct_timestamp, apbct_visible_fields, apbct_visible_fields_count, ct_checkjs, ct_cookies_test, ct_fkp_timestamp, ct_pointer_data, ct_ps_timestamp, ct_sfw_pass_key, ct_timestamp, ct_timezone).

If worried, they are in fact GDPR-compliant. https://cleantalk.org/publicoffer#privacy

Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by them and I refuse to do so, given that spam protection is important.

Social Website Cookies

None, I made the decision not to include any social media share or ‘like’ functionality. If you wish to share on social media, please use your browser to do. If I know my audience, you already use some browser extensions for social media sharing. Buffer, HootSuite, AddThis and AddtoAny are just a few examples. You can follow me using the provided social media icons but that’s it.

Anonymous Visitor Statistics Cookies

I 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 my 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 me to continuously improve my website. These so-called “analytics” programs also tell us, on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g., from a search engine) and whether they have been here before, helping me to know my audience a little better.

I use:

WordPress plugin Jetpack–GDPR-compliant plugin to analyse site traffic and increase site performance via WordPress.com. No personally identifiable data is collected. https://jetpack.com/2018/05/25/jetpack-gdpr/

Turning Cookies Off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so will likely limit the functionality of this site 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 anti-spyware software.

The cookie information text on this site was derived from content provided by Attacat Internet Marketing http://www.attacat.co.uk/, a marketing agency based in Edinburgh. If you need similar information for your own website, you can use their free cookie audit tool.

The above is from physical document P-006 – OES LTD – Cookie Policy – Rev 3, which was issued on January 9th, 2022. As the physical document changes, so will this web page.

If you haven’t already, please review the site privacy policy.