Cookie Policy
What is a Cookie?
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site. Cookies do not contain malicious software programs, spyware or viruses and are used as a means to collect an end user’s information in order to improve the user experience, by making the interaction between the user and the website faster and more personalised, by ‘remembering’ a user’s activity for the duration of the visit to the site ‘Session cookie’ or for repeat visits ‘Persistent cookie’.
What Cookies do we use?
We use the following different types of cookies:
Session cookies
These are temporary cookies which are deleted when you close your browser or leave your session on our site or in the product or service. We use session cookies on our site to identify and track users and to store information about your preferences. Our session cookies may also contain your company name and email address.
Persistent cookies
Persistent cookies enable our site to ‘remember’ who you are and to remember your preferences on our site. Persistent cookies will stay on your computer or device after you close your browser or leave your session.
Load Balancer Cookie
This cookie is essential to help ensure that the website loads efficiently by distributing visits across multiple web servers.
Web analytics cookies and similar technologies such as Google Analytics
These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our site. We use the information to compile reports and to help us improve the site. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the site, where visitors have come to the site from and the pages they visited. Google stores the information collected by the cookies on servers in the United States. Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google’s behalf. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google.
Unless you opt-out of the Google Cookie, by using this site you consent to the use of the Google Cookie and any information generated by Google Analytics. Click here or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.google.com/analytics for an overview of privacy at Google and for information on how to opt-out from all Google Analytics cookies.
What information is collected?
The following information is collected in a cookie:
- Your IP Address. This is a string of numbers unique to your device that is recorded by Stock Cotton’s web server, when you request any page or component on the website. This information is used to monitor your usage of the website.
- Data recorded by the website, which allows Stock Cotton to ‘recognise’ you to optimise the session performance.
No personal information is collected at any time!
Can I control the use of cookies?
Web browsers offer cookie management settings, which can be found in the options menu of the web browser, under ‘tools’. Web browsers can also enable users to delete specific cookies; you can even set a web browser to reject all cookies. However, choosing to disable all cookies could significantly affect your web browsing experience as many Internet services rely on the use of cookies.
Visitors can opt-out of Google Analytics for Display Advertising and customize Google Display Network ads using the Ads Settings, see https://www.google.com/settings/ads. Additionally, visitors may wish to use the Google Analytics Opt-Out Browser Add-on found at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
For a list of how to manage all the different browser cookies, click here or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.aboutcookies.org.uk/managing-cookies.
The below cookies are used by Stock Cotton:
- .AspNet.ApplicationCookie: An authentication cookies used for logging in and out.
- __RequestVerificationToken: ASP.NET anti forgery token (prevent CSRF attack). It guarantees that the poster is the one who gets the form.
- .ASPXANONYMOUS: A cookie used by ASP.Net to track anonymous user sessions
- MachineKey: Configures algorithms and keys to use for encryption, decryption, and validation of forms-authentication data and view-state data, and for out-of-process session state identification.
- CustomerSessionGUID – Used to see if customer has existing session. Stores customer ID, last accessed date and if the customers session is expired or now.
- SERVERID – Identifies which web server the user is using. Used for sticky sessions on load balancer.
- CONSENT: Google's user cookie consent
- NID: The NID cookie contains a unique ID Google uses to remember your preferences and other information, such as your preferred language (e.g. English), how many search results you wish to have shown per page (e.g. 10 or 20), and whether or not you wish to have Google’s SafeSearch filter turned on.
- CartId: A guid used to represent Cart Id
- Email: Customer email, for remembering user's choice "Remember Me" at login screen.
- RememberMe: Cokie value (true/false) to remember user's selection for "Remember Me".
- NewRelic - Used to track site performance
- _gid: Google analytics used to dustinguish users.
- _ga – Numerous google analytics features.
- net - Used for advertising (google)