COOKIES/TRACKING TECHNOLOGIES
Effective on February 14, 2020
At VeteransFranchise.com we use tracking technologies, such as cookies, local storage, and pixel tags. Our
Privacy Policy explains our principles when it comes to the collection, processing, and storage of your information.
This policy specifically explains how we, our partners, and users of our services deploy cookies, as well as the
options you have to control them.
WHAT ARE COOKIES?
For almost any modern website to work properly, it needs to collect certain basic information on its users. To do
this, a site will create files known as cookies – which are small text files – on its users’ computers and other
devices. These cookies are designed to allow VeteransFranchise.com to recognize its users on subsequent visits,
or to authorize other designated websites to recognize these users for a particular purpose.
Cookies do a lot of different jobs which make your experience of the Internet much smoother and more interactive.
For instance, they are used to remember your preferences on sites you visit often, to remember your user ID and the
contents of your shopping baskets, and to help you navigate between pages more efficiently. They also help ensure
that the advertisements that you see online are more relevant to you and your interests. Some data collected is
designed to detect browsing patterns and approximate geographical location to improve user experience.
Some websites may also contain images called "web beacons" (also known as "clear gifs"). Web beacons only collect
limited information, including a cookie number, a timestamp, and a record of the page on which they are placed.
Websites may also carry web beacons placed by third party advertisers. These beacons do not carry any personally
identifiable information and are only used to track the effectiveness of a particular campaign (for example by
counting the number of visitors).
Information collected by cookies is now classed as personal data.
HOW DO WE USE COOKIES?
We collect a number of cookies from our users for various reasons, not least to track our own performance – but also
to let us serve you content tailored to your own specifications, hopefully improving your overall experience
of VeteransFranchise.com. Amongst other things, the cookies we use allow users to register to make comments,
allow us to calculate how many visitors we have and how long they stay on our site.
We do our utmost to respect users’ privacy. We use cookies to monitor and improve our services, but they do also
allow us to sell advertising campaigns that are tailored to your interests and reading behavior on our website,
which helps keeps our content free to our readers. We sometimes include links on our site to goods and services
offered by third parties and we may be paid some commission if you subsequently decide to make a purchase. Cookies
may be used to track your visits to third party sites to help ensure that we are paid the correct amounts. Please
note that these commercial arrangements do not influence our editorial content in any way.
We believe that your experience of the site would be adversely affected if you opted out of the cookies we use.
WHAT TYPES OF COOKIES ARE THERE?
There are two types of cookie:
- Persistent cookies remain on a user’s device for a set period of time specified in the cookie.
They are activated each time that the user visits the website that created that particular cookie.
- Session cookies are temporary. They allow website operators to link the actions of a user
during a browser session. A browser session starts when a user opens the browser window and finishes when they
close the browser window. Once you close the browser, all session cookies are deleted.
Cookies also have, broadly speaking, four different functions and can be categorized as follows:
- ‘strictly necessary’ cookies
- ‘performance’ cookies
- ‘functionality’ cookies
- ‘targeting’ or ‘advertising’ cookies
Learn more about each type of cookie below.
Strictly necessary cookies are essential to navigate around a website and use its features. Without
them, you wouldn’t be able to use basic services like registration or shopping baskets. These cookies do not gather
information about you that could be used for marketing or remembering where you’ve been on the internet.
Examples of how we use strictly necessary cookies include:
- Setting unique identifiers for each unique visitor, so site numbers can be analyzed.
- Allowing you to sign in to the VeteransFranchise.com website as a registered user.
Performance cookies collect data for statistical purposes on how visitors use a website, they don’t
contain personal information such as names and email addresses and are used to improve your user experience of a
website.
Here are some examples of how we use performance cookies:
- Gathering data about visits to the website, including numbers of visitors and visits, length of time spent on
the site, pages clicked on or where visitors have come from.
- For comparison with other websites using data collected by industry-accepted measurement and research
companies.
Information supplied by performance cookies helps us to understand how you use the website; for example, whether or
not you have visited before, what you looked at or clicked on and how you found us. We can then use this data to
help improve our services. We generally use independent analytics companies to perform these services for us and
when this is the case, these cookies may be set by a third-party company (third-party cookies).
If you have registered with the website we can combine the data from the web analytics services and their cookies
with the information you have supplied to us, so that we can make your experience more personal by recommending
certain articles to you based on your reading behavior or tailoring your emails with content you might find more
interesting. We would only do this if you have given us permission to communicate with you. Sometimes the data used
from the web analytics companies has been collected before you registered or signed in. In these cases, if we use
this data to identify you, we use it only in accordance with our privacy notice.
Functionality cookies allow users to customize how a website looks for them: they can remember
usernames, language preferences and regions, and can be used to provide more personal services like local weather
reports and traffic news.
Here are some examples of how we use functionality cookies:
- Storing your user preferences on Your Account page
- Remembering if you’ve been to the site before so that messages intended for first-time users are not displayed
to you.
Advertising and targeting cookies are used to deliver advertisements more relevant to you but can
also limit the number of times you see an advertisement and be used to chart the effectiveness of an ad campaign by
tracking users’ clicks. They can also provide security in transactions. They are usually placed by third-party
advertising networks with a website operator’s permission but can be placed by the operator themselves. They can
remember that you have visited a website, and this information can be shared with other organizations, including
other advertisers. They cannot determine who you are though, as the data collected is never linked to your profile.
The two main ways we use advertising and targeting cookies are set out below:
- Interest-based advertising (or online behavioral advertising) is where cookies are placed on
your device by our third party service providers which remember your web browsing activity and group together
your interests in order to provide you with targeted advertisements which are more relevant to you when you
visit VeteransFranchise.com. Your previous web browsing activity can also be used to infer things about you,
such as your demographics (age, gender etc.). This information may also be used to make the advertising
on VeteransFranchise.com more relevant to you.
- 'Retargeting' is a form of interest-based advertising that enables our advertising partners to
show you advertisements selected based on your online browsing activity away from the website. This allows
companies to advertise to people who previously visited their website. These cookies will usually be placed on
your device by third-party advertising networks and we have listed the main third-party networks we work with
below.
Without these cookies, online advertisements you encounter will be less relevant to you and your interests.
WHICH TYPES OF COOKIES DO WE USE?
At VeteransFranchise.com, we set certain kinds of cookies to provide you with the best user experience. Learn
more about each below.
Account related cookies - if you create an account with us then we will use cookies for the
management of the signup process and general administration. These cookies will usually be deleted when you log out.
However, in some cases, they may remain afterwards to remember your site preferences when logged out.
Login related cookies - we use cookies when you are logged in so that we can remember this fact.
This prevents you from having to log in every single time you visit a new page. These cookies are typically removed
or cleared when you log out to ensure that you can only access restricted features and areas when logged in.
Email newsletters related cookies - this site offers newsletter or email subscription services and
cookies may be used to remember if you are already registered and whether to show certain notifications which might
only be valid to subscribed/unsubscribed users.
Orders processing related cookies - this site offers e-commerce or payment facilities and some
cookies are essential to ensure that your order is remembered between pages so that we can process it properly.
Forms related cookies - when you submit data to through a form such as those found on contact pages
or comment forms cookies may be set to remember your user details for future correspondence.
Site preferences cookies - in order to provide you with a great experience on this site we provide
the functionality to set your preferences for how this site runs when you use it. In order to remember your
preferences, we need to set cookies so that this information can be called whenever you interact with a page is
affected by your preferences.
THIRD-PARTY COOKIES
In some special cases, we also use cookies provided by trusted third parties. The following section details which
third-party cookies you might encounter through this site.
This site uses Google Analytics, which is one of the most widespread and trusted analytics solutions on the web for
helping us to understand how you use the site and ways that we can improve your experience. These cookies may track
things such as how long you spend on the site and the pages that you visit so we can continue to produce engaging
content. For more information on Google Analytics cookies, see the official Google Analytics page.
From time to time, we test new features and make subtle changes to the way that the site is delivered. When we are
still testing new features, these cookies may be used to ensure that you receive a consistent experience whilst on
the site whilst ensuring we understand which optimizations our users appreciate the most.
The Google AdSense service we use to serve advertising uses a DoubleClick cookie to serve more relevant ads across
the web and limit the number of times that a given ad is shown to you. For more information on Google AdSense, see
the official Google AdSense privacy FAQ.
We also use social media buttons and/or plugins on this site that allow you to connect with your social network in
various ways. For these to work, the following social media sites including; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and
Pinterest}, will set cookies through our site which may be used to enhance your profile on their site or contribute
to the data they hold for various purposes outlined in their respective privacy policies.
HOW DO I CONTROL MY COOKIES?
You should be aware that any preferences will be lost if you delete all cookies and many websites will not work
properly or you will lose some functionality. We do not recommend turning cookies off when using our website for
these reasons.
Most browsers accept cookies automatically, but you can alter the settings of your browser to erase cookies or
prevent automatic acceptance if you prefer. Generally, you have the option to see what cookies you’ve got and delete
them individually, block third party cookies or cookies from particular sites, accept all cookies, to be notified
when a cookie is issued or reject all cookies. Visit the ‘options’ or ‘preferences’ menu on your browser to change
settings and check the following links for more browser-specific information.
ENABLING THE DO NOT TRACK (DNT) WEB BROWSER FEATURE
We instead suggest using the Do Not Track (DNT) feature built into your web browser. VeteransFranchise.com
honors DNT requests and will not track anyone who has this setting toggled to an on state. You can learn more about
the DNT feature in your browser by visiting: https://allaboutdnt.com.
MANAGING PERFORMANCE COOKIES
It is possible to opt out of having your anonymized browsing activity within websites recorded by performance
cookies.
VeteransFranchise.com uses the following companies and you can opt out of their cookies by clicking on the
relevant links. Please note that this will take you to the relevant third party’s website and generate a ‘no thanks’
cookie, which will stop any further cookies being set by those third parties.
Don’t forget that by not allowing performance cookies, this stops us from being able to learn what people like or
don’t like about our website so that we can make it better.
Google Analytics: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
Quantcast: https://www.quantcast.com/en-uk/opt-out
MANAGING ADVERTISING COOKIES
Please note that if you want to opt out from receiving targeted advertising, this does not mean that you will
receive less advertising when you use our website. This just means that the advertising you see will not be as
customized to you.
You can visit the Internet Advertising Bureau’s consumer advice site, http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices.
This will give you a list of all cookies that are currently set on your device and how to opt out of each of them.
Please note that this list will contain more networks than just found on VeteransFranchise.com.
We have also set out links below to some of the specific partners we work with who set cookies on our websites, and
therefore on your computer, each of which have instructions on how to opt out of their cookies.
Google – http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt-out.html
USER AGREEMENT
You can change your consents to the use of cookies at any time by clicking
http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices. If you choose not to receive our cookies, we cannot guarantee
that your experience will be as fulfilling as it would otherwise be.
CONSENT FOR ADVERTISING COOKIES ON OUR SITES
You may see a “cookie banner” on our websites and dashboards. If you are visiting one of our sites from the EU, then
we do not set, or allow our ad partners to set, cookies that are used to show you targeted ads before you click to
accept. When you consent in this manner, we and our advertising partners may set advertising cookies on the site you
are visiting and on our other websites, dashboards, and services, which we use to show you advertisements about our
various products and services. We’ll display the banner to you periodically, just in case you change your mind.
Consent and Choices for Advertisements on Our Users’ Sites Through Our Ads Program
You may see a “cookie banner” on our users’ websites, particularly if you are in the European Union. If so, then our
ad program does not set, or allow our ad partners to set, cookies that are used to show you targeted ads before you
accept. When you consent in this manner, we and our advertising partners may set third party advertising cookies on
our network in order to show you personalized ads. We’ll display the banner to you periodically, just in case you
change your mind.
We set a cookie to help us understand how visitors engage with websites that participate in our ad program. Visitors
may opt out of our use of this information by visiting this link (the opt-out will be processed immediately with no
confirmation step). When you opt out, we replace the unique value for that cookie with an opt-out value. The opt-out
works across all websites in our ads program. If you have opted out by accident, or wish to opt back in, you may do
so by visiting this link. Please note that this option is browser specific, and so if you use a different device or
browser or clear your cookies, then you will need to repeat the process.
MORE INFORMATION
Hopefully that has clarified things for you and, as previously mentioned, if there is something that you aren't sure
whether you need or not, it's usually safer to leave cookies enabled in case it does interact with one of the
features you use on our site.
If you have any questions about our use of cookies, you can find the most relevant contact details in our Privacy
Policy here. https://www.veteransfranchise.com/privacy-policy.
However, if you are still looking for more information, you can contact us via email at info@veteransfranchise.com.
