Cookies
Last updated: 12 September 2021
We rely on cookies to make our site work, understand where we need to make improvements, and in our marketing efforts. Some of these cookies involve tracking of users as they move through or between websites and the gathering of information in order to personalise content and advertising. Where such cookies involve the processing of your personal information, this is covered by our Privacy Policy.
What are cookies?
Cookies are small data files that are placed on your computer or mobile device when you visit a website. Cookies set by the website owner or service provider (in this case, Big Clean Switch) are called “first-party cookies”. Cookies set by parties other than the website owner are called “third-party cookies”. Third-party cookies enable third-party features or functionality to be provided on or through the website or service you are using (such as advertising, interactive content and analytics). These third-party cookies enable those third parties to recognise your computer as it visits different websites.
Why do we use cookies and other tracking technologies?
We use first-party and third-party cookies for several reasons.
Essential Cookies
Some cookies are required for technical reasons in order for our website to function properly. We refer to these as “essential” cookies.
Counting Cookies
Some cookies allow us to understand how our website is being used by visitors. These cookies, mostly placed by our analytics provider, Google, differentiate between different visitors and store aggregated data about them to enable us to identify trends or problems in how people use the site.
Advertising Cookies
As with most other businesses, we use advertising to reach out to people we think may be interested in our website. Cookies allow us to identify when people click through from an advertiser, as well as helping us to find people who may be interested in our services (such as someone who may previously have visited our site) when they use other people’s products and services. These advertising cookies then allow those websites and apps to display tailored content.
Cookies served through Big Clean Switch
The specific types of first and third-party cookies served through our Big Clean Switch and the purposes they perform are described in further detail below. It should be noted that third party providers may add, change or stop using cookies from time to time. We make every effort to keep track of these changes and to update this policy accordingly, but if you become aware that any of the information below is out of date, please email us at my.data@bigcleanswitch.org to let us know.
| Cookie name | Placed by | Category | Purpose | Maximum expiry |
| _big_clean_switch_session | Big Clean Switch | Essential | This cookie enables our website to ‘remember’ you across multiple pages of our website by allocating a unique ‘session ID’ to you. Our website won’t work without it. | Session |
| civicCookieControl | Civic | Essential | This cookie is required to apply your cookie selection preferences. It is provided by Civic, who developed our cookie control plug-in. | 3 months |
| __cfduid | Crisp | Essential | This is a technical cookie required by Cloudfare, the content delivery network (CDN) provider for Crisp, who power our chatbot. A CDN is a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content. The cookie ensures that visitors are recognised as legitimate browsers and not bots. If this cookie was not set, users would often not be able to load the chatbox as they could be flagged as a bot. It is not used for tracking purposes. | 30 days |
| crisp-client* | Crisp | Essential | These are cookies that are required so that our chatbot (provided by crisp.chat) works and is able to restore a visitor message history. Without those cookies, you would have a new chat session every time you switched to a new page, and you might receive the same messages multiple times. | 30 days |
| sb | Counting | Used to store browser & device details | 2 years | |
| SID | Counting | Used to identify when a user is signed into Google’s services. | 2 years | |
| SAPISID | Counting | Unique identifier for tracking purposes. | 2 years | |
| _ga | Counting | Set by Google Analytics. They are used to calculate visitor, session and campaign data for our site analytics reports. | 2 years | |
| _gid | Counting | Set by Google Analytics. They are used to calculate visitor, session and campaign data for our site analytics reports. | 24 hours | |
| fr | Advertising | Used for targeting purposes to build a profile of the website visitor’s interests in order to show relevant and personalised Facebook advertising | 3 months | |
| xs | Advertising | Used to identify when a user is signed into Facebook’s services. | 3 months | |
| c_user | Advertising | Used to verify when you’re logged into Facebook so that Facebook can make it easier for you to access their products and show you relevant content. | 1 year | |
| _fbp | Advertising | This cookie enables us to track when adverts we run on Facebook result in someone taking an activity on our own website. It also allows Facebook to deliver you more targeted advertising, and for us to show you related content on Facebook after you have visited our site. | 3 months | |
| _pk_uid | TV Squared | Advertising | Allows the TV Squared collector to identify individual users, in order to establish lag between response activities, and to confirm continuity of campaigns being responded to. | 2 years |
| _pk_id.{variable id} or _tq_id.{variable id} | TV Squared | Advertising | Aids reporting of site visits and actions for analytical reporting to TV Squared. | 2 years |
| _pk_ses | TV Squared | Advertising | Used to confirm an individual user in relation to an individual session, i.e. how long the user is on the website. | 30 minutes |
| __Secure-3PSID | Advertising | Used for targeting purposes to build a profile of the website visitor’s interests in order to show relevant and personalised Google advertising. | 2 years | |
| __Secure-3PSIDCC | Advertising | Targeting cookie. Used by for targeting purposes to build a profile of the website visitor’s interests in order to show relevant and personalised Google advertising. | 2 years | |
| SSID | Advertising | For targeting purposes to build a profile of the website visitor’s interests in order to show relevant and personalised Google advertising. | 6 months – 10 years | |
| HSID | Advertising | Used to identify when a user is signed into Google’s services. | 1 year | |
| SIDCC | Advertising | Security cookie to protect a user’s data from unauthorized access | 6 months | |
| __Secure-3PAPISID | Advertising | Used for targeting purposes to build a profile of the website visitor’s interests in order to show relevant and personalised Google advertising | 2 years | |
| APISID | Advertising | Used for targeting purposes to build a profile of the website visitor’s interests in order to show relevant and personalised Google advertising | 2 years | |
| DV | Advertising | Used for targeting purposes to build a profile of the website visitor’s interests in order to show relevant and personalised Google advertising | 2 years | |
| NID | Advertising | Used for targeting purposes to build a profile of the website visitor’s interests in order to show relevant and personalised Google advertising | 2 years | |
| ANID | Advertising | Used for targeting purposes to build a profile of the website visitor’s interests in order to show relevant and personalised Google advertising | 2 years | |
| SEARCH_SAMESITE | Advertising | Prevents other websites from accessing information stored in particular Google cookies in order to mitigate the risk of information leakage and ‘cross-site request forgery’ (CSRF). | 6 months | |
| __ar_v4 | Advertising | This cookie is used to track conversion rates for adverts run by us through Google search and other services. | 30 days | |
| IDE | Advertising | Serving and rendering ads, personalising ads (depending on your ad settings at g.co/adsettings), limiting the number of times an ad is shown to a user, muting ads you have chosen to stop seeing, and measuring the effectiveness of ads. | 2 years |
Learning more
Further information about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set on your computer or mobile device and how to manage and delete them, visit www.allaboutcookies.org and www.youronlinechoices.eu.