Darlington Town Twinning & International Association website, like many others, uses cookies. These are small text files that help to improve your experience on our website.
The page below provides you with more information about cookies and how you can control how we use them.
Cookies are small text files that are placed onto your computer or other device by your browser when you visit a website. They allow websites to store things such as your preferences and other information that you provide, which allows us to change our website to respond appropriately to your needs.
Darlington Town Twinning & International Association, uses numerous different types of cookies in order to provide a better experience to you. This is how we use them:
When you visit our website, the third party tracking software that we use (StatCounter) generates an analytics cookie.
These cookies check to see if you have ones with the same information in already - meaning that you have visited the website before, or if you are a new user.
The cookies also record information about your visit, such as your IP address (which can provide us with information such as Country of Origin (where you are accessing the website from), even down to the town that the exchange is located in), the pages that you visit, the amount of time that you spend on the website and where you came from (i.e. if you came from a search engine, another website, or simply typed our website address in), which allow us to not only tailor your experience in the future, but also to improve our website for you and other users based on your use!
We do not and cannot find out any other information (such as names/addresses/telephone numbers/email addresses) from cookies (they can only provide this if you log in - which we don't ask you to do).
We only use the analytical cookies for statistical purposes only.
When you log in or sign up to a "restricted area" of the Darlington Town Twinning & International Association website, we generate cookies that signal whether you are signed in or not.
Our servers use these cookies to work out whether you are still signed in, in order to allow or deny you access to a particular service or area of the website.
We do not gather any information (other than that stated) from these cookies.
On some of our pages, we use external content (such as videos) that are hosted from external content providers (such as YouTube). Since the content is not stored on our servers, we cannot control what cookies these third party content providers use and the information that they request from you.
Because of the way that cookies work, we cannot access these cookies or the information stored from them, nor can the external providers access any of the cookies or the information that they store.
Most users leave cookies turned on, as providing annoymous information doesn't bother them, however, if you do wish to stop your browser from accepting cookies completely, or from a particular website, it is usually possible to do so.
The choice is up to you, however, please remember that without cookies it is extremely hard to provide you with the best website experience that we can!
All modern and well known browsers allow you to change your settings with cookies, these are generally found within the 'Options' or 'Preferences' menu. You can use any of the following links to find out exactly where your settings are:
Cookie settings in Internet Explorer
Cookie settings in Firefox
Cookie settings in Chrome
Cookie settings in Safari web
Cookie settings in iOS.
Although we don't have any advertisements on our website (other than our own), many other websites do - if you are concerned about third party cookies generated by advertisers you can go to the Your Online Choices website and turn them off from one central place.
If you would like to find out more information on cookies and how they are used on the Internet, go to either Microsoft Cookies Guide or All About Cookies.
The Your Online Choices website provides information specifically on privacy issues around internet advertising.
Further legal information about privacy issues, can be found at the following addresses:
Data Protection Act 1998
The Information Commissioner's Office
If you would like to contact us about cookies or anything else to do with our website, please email Matthew Harrington (Website Administrator).