PAUL SAMAEL

cookies

In common with the majority of websites, this one uses "cookies."  These are small files that are downloaded to your device when you visit pages on this site (click here for more detail).  I'm required to tell you this because of some European Union rules which are well-intentioned - but, in my view, perhaps not the best-conceived legislation that the EU has ever come up with (click here for more discussion of that).  Anyway, here goes:

The cookies allow Yola (which hosts my site) to tell me how many visitors I've had and which pages on my site are most popular.  They also help Yola to manage its traffic across all the sites that it hosts.  All that information is anonymised, so I can't tell who's actually been browsing my site (and nor can Yola, so far as I'm aware).   So my view is that there isn't any particularly sinister form of tracking going on here - and my site does not use this kind of cookie, which you might feel is rather more objectionable (or you may not care). 

If you use the comments function on my blog, then Disqus - which provides that functionality and is separate from Yola - will also place cookies on your device.  Click here for more information on that.   A new draft EU law may mean that the kind of cookies used on this site no longer require consent (as the EU has belatedly recognised that some commonly-used cookies are not particularly "privacy-intrusive").  But for the time being, I need to tell you what they are and how you can block them.

I don't want cookies, thanks

If you don't want cookies to be downloaded to your device, you can alter your browser settings to block them - click HERE for instructions on how to do that. It shouldn't affect your ability to browse this site, but it may mean that you can't use Disqus to comment on my blog (no doubt you'll be absolutely gutted about that).  As far as I can see, Yola doesn't offer users the ability to stop cookies being downloaded for sites that it hosts - so the only way to do it is by blocking them in your web browser.

Here's chapter and verse on the cookies that Yola uses:

• The analytics cookie: This is placed and hosted by Yola. When someone visits a Yola website, this cookies helps Yola to collect standard internet log information. Yola does this to find out things such as the number of visitors to its users' websites. It collects this information in a way which does not identify anyone. Analytics information is helpful to website owners as it helps them to gauge their site’s success.

• The Quantcast cookie: This is placed by Yola but hosted by quantcast.com. It's a third-party cookie and helps Yola track traffic across all hosted sites. This helps Yola to manage server load and ensure that users’ websites are served up quickly.