Cookie policy

INM (the “INM”) ("us", "we" or "our") uses "cookies" to help us remember details of your visits to our website which can be found at www.independent.ie (the “Site”) including, but not limited to technical information about your visit e.g. traffic data, location data, browser language, your IP address, the previous website from which you reached us and the type of browser you use. Accordingly, our Privacy Statement will apply to our treatment of the information we obtain via our cookies.

A cookie is a small data file that is transferred to your device (e.g. your phone or your computer) which collects information, including personal information about you. For example, a cookie could allow the Site to recognise your browser/login details, while another could store your preferences and other information and let you navigate the Site effectively. Cookies can also help to ensure that adverts you see online are more relevant to you and your interests.

Statistical and analytical information from cookies provides us with general and not individually specific information about the number of people who visit this website; the number of people who return to this site; the pages that they visit; where they were before they came to this site and the page in the site at which they exited. This information helps us monitor traffic on our website so that we can manage the site's capacity and efficiency. It also helps us to understand which parts of this site are most popular, and generally to assess user behaviour and characteristics in order to measure interest in and use of the various areas of the site.

We may partner with or receive services from third parties which you can visit from our website. We may also embed external content and features from such third parties within our website (e.g. social media networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter). We do not control the content or links that appear on these sites and are not responsible for the practices employed by websites linked to or from our Site. In addition, these sites or services, including their content and links, may be constantly changing. These sites and services may have their own privacy statements and customer service policies. Browsing and interaction on any other website, including websites which have a link to our Site, is subject to that website’s own terms and policies.

MANAGING AND DISABLING COOKIES

You can choose to not accept the setting of cookies. Your browser may allow you to set how it handles cookies. You can manage cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to decline all cookies or which prompts you on whether to accept each cookie and/or opening the browser help menu and access settings to block or erase cookie activity. If you use your browser setting to block all or some cookies (including strictly or technically necessary cookies) all or some parts of the Site may not work as intended or may not work at all without cookies.

CHANGES TO OUR COOKIE POLICY

We can change this Cookie Policy at any time. If we make material changes to this Cookie Policy, we will let you know either by posting the changed Cookie Policy on the Site or by sending you an email.

It’s important that you review the changed Cookie Policy. If you do not wish to agree to the changed Cookies Policy, then we cannot continue to provide the Site to you, and your only option is to stop accessing the Site.

TYPES OF COOKIES

The following are the main types of cookies used on the Site:

FIRST PARTY COOKIES

These are our own cookies, controlled by us and used to provide information about usage of our site. The following is a listing of the main cookies used on our site together with brief details of the information they store and for what purpose:

Cookie

Description

Expiry

Site performance cookies

This type of cookie remembers your preferences/settings for tools found on an INM site.

Cookies are expired when the session is completed.

Analytics cookies

Every time a user visits our website, web analytics software provided by a third party generates an anonymous analytics cookie. These cookies can tell us whether or not you have visited the site before. Your browser will tell us if you have these cookies, and if you don't, we generate new ones. This allows us to track how many individual unique users we have, and how often they visit the site. Unless you are signed in to an INM site, these cookies cannot be used to identify individuals; they are used for statistical purposes only. If you are logged in, we will also know the details you gave to us for this, such as username and email address.

The expiration date is varying on different analytics tools between 1 and 2 years

Registration cookies

When you register with an INM site, we generate cookies that signal whether you are signed in or not. Our servers use these cookies to work out which account you are signed in with, and if you are allowed access to a particular service. It also allows us to associate any comments you post with your username. If you have not selected 'keep me signed in,' your cookies get deleted when you either close your browser or shut down your computer. While you are signed into this site, we combine information from your registration cookies with analytics cookies, which we could use to identify which pages you have seen on an INM site.

Cookies are expired after a year or when the user logs out.

Subscription Cookies

International Micro Payment Ventures Ltd, operating under the trademark Flip-Pay, provide Digital Edition subscription, payment, identity management and analytics services to INM, for the purpose of content monetisation. ( i.e. e-paper subscriptions )

The personal data it collects is to provide a seamless but secure purchasing environment. This data is not sold to third parties and Flip-Pay maintains the highest standards of security.

The use of cookies is minimal and is only used for session management. FlipPay uses Stripe to process credit card information. This data is not shared or accessible to third parties and is encrypted.

Cookies are expired when the session is completed.

ADVERTISING COOKIES/TRACKERS

How INM uses Cookies in Advertising

Cookies help to make advertising more effective. Without cookies, it’s harder for an advertiser to reach its audience, or to know how many ads were shown and how many clicks they received.

INM uses the following advertising cookies DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and Bluekai DMP. DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) is an advertisement software as a service application run by Google. It can be used as an ad server but it also provides a variety of features for managing the sales process of online ads using a publisher's dedicated sales team. Should a publisher not sell out all their available ad inventory, it can choose to run either other ad networks as remnant inventory and monetize programmatically.

Bluekai DMP Bluekai DMP, INM’s other advertising cookie, forms the backbone of all online advertising operations for an economy that has increasingly become more digital. While several technology companies claim to provide DMPs, a “real” DMP provides marketers with centralized control of all of their audience and campaign data, helping them manage and analyse this data to craft, target, and optimize campaigns that reach more of the right people and drive improved ROI from their media spend.

THIRD PARTY COOKIES

These are cookies found in other companies’ internet tools which we are using to enhance our site, for example Facebook or Twitter, have their own cookies, which are controlled by them.

A lot of the advertisements you see on this site are generated by third parties. Some of these third parties use their own anonymous cookies to track how many people have seen a particular ad, or to track how many people have seen it more than once.

Visitors should be aware that INM is unable to control the use of cookies or the resulting information by other third parties such as advertisers or parties hosting data. These cookies cannot be used to identify an individual; they can only be used for statistical purposes, for example, in providing you with advertisements that are more relevant to your interests.

The companies that generate these cookies have their own privacy statements and INM has no access to read or write these cookies, other than allowing them to be served, we have no role to play in these cookies at all (although we may use statistical information arising from these third party cookies and provided to us by third parties, to improve the targeting of advertisements to users of the website). These third party advertising cookies may be used by those third parties to anonymously target advertising to you on other websites, based on your visit to an INM site.

If you would like to disable "third party" cookies generated by advertisers or providers of targeted advertising services, you can turn them off by going to the third party's website and getting them to generate a one-time "no thanks" cookie that will stop any further cookies being written to your machine. The following are links to the main third party advertising, analytics, survey and commenting platforms we use, each of which provides instructions on how to do this:

Advertising: 6 trackers

DoubleClick

Google Adsense

Google Publisher Tags

Nativo

Rubicon

ScoreCard Research Beacon

DoubleClick for Publisher (DFP)

BlueKai DMP

Site Analytics: 4 trackers

ChartBeat

Gigya