Use of cookies on this website

To comply with the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations we periodically conduct a Cookie Audit of our website. This Cookie Audit was last updated on 25 September 2012.

Our website uses a number of cookies to store data on our visitor’s computers.  For more information about managing cookies, please see http://www.aboutcookies.org/.

In Summary

Our current assessment of the intrusiveness of the cookies used by our website is as follows:

  • First-party cookies: we use cookies to monitor how visitors find and use our website.  We report on this activity in aggregate, and use this information solely for the purposes of monitoring and improving our website.

We believe there is no reason for our website visitors to be particularly concerned about the privacy implications of any of the cookies we use, but we do recognise the importance of making you aware of the purpose and scope of the data stored in the cookies which are created or updated on your computer when you visit our website. You may choose to delete these cookies from your computer between visits to our website.

We recommend that if you have concerns about the privacy implications of the cookies we use, then you should investigate how to do this using the cookie management tools in your web browser.

In Detail: First party Cookies

First party cookies are specific to the host site that created them (in this case, sigma-cs.com).  In all cases these first-party cookies do not store any personal or sensitive information, or anything that makes you personally identifiable to us.

Session IDs: Our web server may create an essential session cookie called ASP.NET_SessionId ,which is essential for your use of some of the interactive elements of the website, such as contact forms.  The cookie contains a session ID which is a mechanism for distinguishing your visit to our website from any other visitors that may be using the website at the same time. For more information you can read this technical article on the Microsoft website about Session IDs. This cookie expires when you leave our website.

Cookie Consent: If you have chosen to consent to our use of cookies, as outlined on this page, then we place a cookie called CookieConsent on your computer.  This stores the word “Yes” and is set to expire approximately 20 years after you first give us your consent.

Analytics: We use Google Analytics, which creates a number of first-party cookies, all prefixed __utm:

  • __utma: contains a unique and anonymous identifying ID, which allows us to ensure that subsequent visits to our website are recorded as belonging to the same (unique) visitor. This cookie expires after two years.
  • __utmb: used to establish and continue a unique user session. Each time you request another page from the website the cookie is updated to expire after 30minutes.
  • __utmc: works with __utmb to determine when to create a new session for a website visitor. This is a session cookie and expires when you exit the browser.
  • __utmz: tracks how you found us and is used to calculate traffic and navigation within the website. It is updated with every new page view and expires after 6 months.
  • You may also sometimes find a __utmv cookie which relates to custom reporting segments, a feature which we occasionally use on Google Analytics.

Full details of the cookies which Google Analytics uses can be found in Cookies & Google Analytics in documentation for Google’s Analytics tracking code. You can also read Google’s Privacy Policy for Google Analytics.

We don’t believe that our use of Google Analytics is privacy-intrusive. We use the data that is collected in the following ways:

  • to report, in aggregate, how our visitors find and use our website;
  • to understand overall visitor behaviour; and
  • to inform how we update and improve our website.

We do allow Google to use this data to collate and aggregate benchmarking data, which they provide to us, about similar websites in our industry.  To do this Google further anonymises the analytics data by removing all identifiable information about our website, and combines the data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable industries.

We do not share our analytics data with any other third parties.

To opt out of our use of Google Analytics you may wish to consider using the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.

Referrers: If you arrive at our website from an external site such as Google, a cookie named EscrivoFormHandler_Referrers will be set. This cookie is used to help determine which websites visitors to our site are coming from. This is a session cookie and will expire when you exit the browser.