Cookies provide website owners with information about your visit to their website, such as how you entered the site, how you navigated through the site and what information was of interest to you. North Yorkshire County Council collects such information indirectly when you access www.northyorks.gov.uk and the other websites or web applications that we manage (some of which are managed on behalf of North Yorkshire County Council by third party suppliers).
Cookies make your experience of using web sites faster and easier. They are not programs and cannot carry viruses or install malware on your computer. Cookies allow web sites to create a customised view of pages to which you navigate. For example, they are commonly used to authenticate or identify registered users of a website without requiring them to sign in each time they access it. Other uses include maintaining a 'shopping basket' of goods a user has chosen to purchase, site personalisation (presenting different pages to different users) and tracking the pages a user has visited on a site for analysis purposes.
A cookie often includes a unique identifier, which is a randomly generated number. This is stored on your device's hard drive. Many cookies are automatically deleted after you finish using a website.
Cookies may come with or without an expiry date. Cookies without an expiry date (session cookie) exist until the browser is closed, while cookies with an expiry date may be stored by the device until the expiry date passes.
You can restrict or block cookies set by North Yorkshire County Council but this may limit your use of some functionality, such as filling in forms and getting access to password protected areas that are in use across any of the sites we manage. However, most things you do on our site will still be possible even with cookies disabled.
North Yorkshire County Council uses third-party suppliers who also set cookies throughout our web sites on our behalf to deliver the services that they are providing or to record usage. More information on the cookies we and our third-party suppliers set can be found below.
Cookies are sent to your browser (whether you use Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari or any other browser) by a website and then stored in the cookies directory of your device.
To find out how to allow, block, delete and manage the cookies on all standard web browsers please visit the About cookies website. If you use a mobile phone or a tablet to browse our website (or other sites that use cookies), please refer to your device's manual for guidance.
The following table lists the cookies you may come across on this site. Note that several of them perform similar functions;
Website: www.northyorks.gov.uk
Our corporate website is run using a content management system. This produces cookies that are used across the main website as follows;
| Name of cookie | Description and usage of cookie |
ASP.NET_SessionID | This cookie is essential to be able to use our website. It is created as soon as you visit our website, and stores a unique identifier for your session. This session cookie is stored in temporary memory and is erased when you close your web browser. |
Google Analytics; _utma, _utmb, _utmc, _utmz | The Council website uses Google Analytics (a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc). Google Analytics sets a cookie in order to evaluate your use of the website and compile reports for us on activity on the website. It is using these reports that we base our decisions on where information should be placed to make it easier for you to find. |
Clientvars | Used to maintain session information for the platforms other than Microsoft .NET that run our website. |
Mode | Used to maintain session information for users who choose to view the site in different contrast modes i.e. colour scheme and text size cookies. |
firmstep2server | These are used for some of our online forms. These are required so the forms work correctly and remember the data you are inserting. They expire when you close your browser. |
XitSurvey | We conduct web visitor exit surveys which deposit a cookie on your browser. The cookie is deposited so that a record is kept of how many times the user is prompted to complete the form. If this is disabled you will always get a prompt as the survey software will not know you've prompted previously. |
CFID and CFToken | The Unettie (picture archives) website uses these two cookies which are essential for its software (Coldfusion) to work properly. |
(These are cookies set by other web sites whose services we use).
Online mapping: http://maps.northyorks.gov.uk/connect/
This is the online mapping system which provides users with the opportunity to find points of interest and displays maps about various services throughout the county. The system uses one recently used addresses cookie named 'LocatorHistory'. This is a persistent cookie which is remembered between sessions. The purpose of this cookie is to allow the mapping system to keep a record of recently selected addresses a user has zoomed to. The cookie persists for 259 days.
Talis: http://www.talis.com/
This is the main library booking, search and renewal system. Cookies are used to allow you to log in to the system, see your personal lists, perform searches and renew books. For more information visit the privacy pages of the Capita Software and Managed Services website.
Overdrive ebooks: http://northyorks.lib.overdrive.com/
This is the ebooks digital library system that is provided by the supplier: Overdrive. This system uses cookies to keep track of cart items and to store passwords. For more information please view Overdrives privacy policy.
Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/
Google analytics is a web statistics package. We use Google Analytics to gather information about how you use our websites. Google sets a cookie so we can see which pages people have landed on and how they have navigated through the site. We cannot obtain personal information from this data. For more information visit Cookies and Google Analytics and the Google privacy center: privacy policy.
The data we collect helps us identify those services that matter to you by enabling us to understand:
Google have developed a browser Add-on which excludes Google Analytics recording your activities on any websites using Google Analytics. It's totally free and can be installed on most browsers. At the time of writing, this add-on is still in BETA (last stage of testing before commercial release).
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/
We embed some Twitter feeds on our pages. Twitter then use cookies to determine who follows the various links contained in these embedded feeds. For further information read the Twitter privacy policy.
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/
We embed some Facebook feeds on our pages. Facebook then use cookies to determine who follows the various links contained in these embedded feeds. For further information read the Facebook privacy policy.
AddThis.com: http://www.addthis.com/
The "Share" button on the social booking marking tool we on our webpage's are a third party product from Clearspring that allows you to bookmark and share the web page you are visiting. Clearspring use cookies to aggregate data to offer reporting to websites that use AddThis and help their advertisers.
For further information read the AddThis privacy and data practices page.
We do use other services and the list is not exhaustive. We are adding to this information as quickly as we can. If you've any questions about any website or web application in particular please contact us via email on: webteam@northyorks.gov.uk.
Many sites we refer you to will immediately set session cookies. We cannot audit the use of cookies by these external sites so you should be aware of their use and be prepared to manage them if you follow links to other sites from the North Yorkshire County Council website.