Privacy Policy - Cookies
A cookie lets a website recognise your device and store some information about your preferences or interactions.
Why we use cookies
We use protect.scot cookie tracking data to make informed decisions on whether the site is meeting your needs, which leads to us making improvements. For example, we monitor how much traffic each part of the site gets and work to improve areas which are not being found when they should be.
Google Analytics
This site places small files, known as 'cookies', onto your computer to collect information about how you browse. These cookies aren't used to identify you personally.
You will normally see a message on the site before we store a cookie on your computer.
Find out more about how to manage cookies.
Measuring site usage
We use Google Analytics to collect information about how you use protect.scot. We do this to help make sure the site is meeting your needs and to help us make improvements.
We store information about:
- The pages you visit and how long you spend on each page
- How you got to protect.scot
- What you click on while you're visiting protect.scot
We do not:
- Collect information that can be used to identify you; for example, we never receive your name or address
- Make any attempt to find out the identities of people visiting protect.scot
- Allow the tools that we use to find out the identities of people visiting protect.scot
- Sell, trade or give your details to third parties, unless we are required to do it by law
All information we get through cookies and analytics will be treated in confidence.
Find out more about security and privacy in Google Analytics.
| Name | Purpose | Expiry |
|---|---|---|
| _ga | This is used to understand and differentiate between different users. | 38 Months |
| _gid | _gid has a different ID for each page set on, and a timestamp. This assists with plotting user journeys. | 24 Hours |
| _gat | We use Google Tag Manager to tailor our tracking in case we have different elements that are being tested. For example, setting a tag to track how far a user is having to scroll down a long page. The _gat tag pushes the request rate through quicker. | 1 Minute |
| _hjAbsoluteSessionInProgress | This cookie is used to detect the first pageview session of a user. This is a True/False flag set by the cookie. | Session |
| _hjid | This cookie is set when the customer first lands on a page with the Hotjar script. It is used to persist the Hotjar User ID, unique to that site on the browser. This ensures that behavior in subsequent visits to the same site will be attributed to the same user ID. | 12 months |
| _hjIncludedInSessionSample | This cookie is set to let Hotjar know whether that visitor is included in the data sampling defined by your site's daily session limit. | 30 minutes |
| __hjRecordingLastActivity | This should be found in Session storage (as opposed to cookies). This gets updated when a visitor recording starts and when data is sent through the WebSocket (the visitor performs an action that Hotjar records). | Session |
| VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE | This cookie is used as a unique identifier to track viewing of videos. | 6 Months |
| YSC | YouTube is a Google owned platform for hosting and sharing videos. YouTube collects user data through videos embedded in websites, which is aggregated with profile data from other Google services in order to display targeted advertising to web visitors across a broad range of their own and other websites. | Session |
Opt out: You can opt out of Google analytics cookies.