Cookie statement
The Broads Authority is committed to protecting your privacy as a user of our website www.visitthebroads.co.uk and the confidentiality of any personal information that you may provide us with during your visit to the site. Broads Authority abides by UK Data Protection legislation including the EU General Data Protection Regulation.
Information is gathered automatically by the web server, through the use of cookies on the site, and also from your interaction through online requests for brochures, the use of tolls online, planning portal search as well as the submissions of online forms. This page solely covers cookies, you can read more about your privacy relating to other areas of our website by reading our privacy policy.
General information that is collected by the web server and which does not require any input on your part, apart from to log on to the site, is data such as: type of browser, operating system, IP address and domain name.
Cookies
A cookie is a text-only string that is entered into the memory of your browser by our web server. The use of cookies enables our website to store information on your machine so that it can be retrieved at a later date. This is done so that we can monitor the number of people visiting our site and to determine the country of origin of specific users. If you do not wish to accept new cookies or wish to disable cookies altogether, you can set your browser accordingly through your settings/preferences.
How we use cookies
Cookies are small files which are sent to your browser (for example Internet Explorer or Firefox) and stored on your computer's hard disk. They only identify your computer and not you personally.
Google Analytics web analytics cookies: These cookies are used to help record your use of this website. They are used to collect statistics about site usage such as when you last visited the site. This information is then used to improve the user experience on our website. The Google Analytics cookies contain randomly generated IDs used to recognise your browser when you read a page. The cookies contain no personal information and are used only for web analytics. We will soon be transitioning to using GA4 Google Analytics, which uses less cookies and provides a more private browsing experience.
Facebook cookies: These are third-party cookies which may show collect information if a user is signed into a Facebook account. You can visit Facebook's cookie policy for more information or see the table below. Some of these cookies may show on our website as we have ran Facebook ad campaigns in the past.
Other session cookies: These are first-party cookies which ensure that users can maintain a session on the website without losing data, for example when accessing Tolls online.
The table below shows the list of cookies which are potentially collected on our website. Not all users will see all cookies being collected as this varies based on which page is being accessed and whether the user is using an incognito browser window or not. You can view which cookies are being collected at any given moment by clicking the padlock icon near the address bar in your browser window.
Cookies collected on our website
| Name | Owner | Expiration | Information/purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| _utma | Google Analytics | Two years after your last visit | Tracks whether you have visited the website before. We use this to establish how many new and returning visitors are coming to our website. |
| _utmb | Google Analytics | 30 minutes after your last visit | Establishes a ‘user session’ and tracks which pages you look at on this visit to the website. We use this to identify which pages are popular, and the routes that users take through the website. |
| _utmc | Google Analytics | Expires when session ends/user closes browser | Connected with _utmb and expires when you closed your browser, rather than just visit another website. Used to determine whether or not to establish a new session for the user. |
| _utmt | Google Analytics | 10 minutes | Used by Google Analytics to throttle request rate. |
| _utmv | Google Analytics | Two years after your last visit | Used by Google Analytics to store visitor-level custom variable data. |
| _utmz | Google Analytics | Six months from when it was last set/updated | Tracks and stores whether you have come to the website from a search engine, another website or have typed the web address directly into your browser. We use this to identify how users are reaching our website. |
| _ga | Google Analytics | Two years after your last visit | Used to identify unique users in Google Analytics. This information is anonymously collected to help improve your website experience. |
| _gat_UA-xxxxxxxx-1 | Google Analytics | One minute | Used by Google Analytics to limit the amount of data recorded by Google on high traffic volume websites.. Expires after one minute. |
| _gid | Google Analytics | One day | Used by Google Analytics to identify users and their behaviour on the site. This information is anonymously collected to help improve your website experience. |
| SQ_SYSTEM_SESSION | Broads Authority | Expires when session ends/user closes browser | Server session ID. |
| JSESSIONID | Broads Authority | Expires when session ends/user closes browser | JSESSIONID is a platform session cookie and is used by sites with JavaServer Pages. The cookie is used to maintain an anonymous user session by the server when accessing pages such as Tolls online and Planning application search. |
| DSID | Two weeks | Used to identify a signed-in user on non-Google sites and to remember whether the user has agreed to ad personalization. | |
| IDE | 13 months | Used to show Google ads on non-Google sites. | |
| Visitor_INFO1_LIVE | YouTube | 179 days | Tries to estimate the users' bandwidth on pages with embedded YouTube videos to ascertain whether to display the new or old style player. |
| YSC | YouTube | Expires when session ends/user closes browser | Registers a unique ID to keep statistics of what videos from YouTube the user has seen. |
We encourage you to accept the cookies our website uses as they help us to improve the user experience for you and many others.
To delete cookies or reject cookies
If you do not want to receive cookies from this website, select cookie settings under the privacy settings in your browser options, then add our domain to the list of websites you do not want to accept cookies from. Under settings you can also delete individual cookies or any cookies that your browser has stored. You can find more information on how to delete and control cookies at http://www.aboutcookies.org/Default.aspx?page=2
Where to find information about controlling cookies
(This page was last updated 15/09/22)