Oyster Cookie Policy

A cookie is a small text file that is entered into the memory of your web browser on your computer, laptop, mobile, etc., by a website, allowing the website to store information on your machine and later retrieve it. It is used to differentiate you from other users accessing our site. All cookie information is encrypted.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website, for website statistics, to help us improve the user experience, and we may use them for remarketing.

The types of cookies that the Softcat website may generate are:

Advertising cookies

These cookies give us an insight into an advert – whether you’ve seen a particular advert, a type of advert, and how long it has been since you’ve seen it.

We may also set anonymous cookies on certain other sites that we advertise on. If you receive one of those cookies, we may then use it to identify you as having visited that site if you later visit the Softcat website. We may then use this information to target our advertising.

Every time someone visits our website, software provided by another organization generates an ‘anonymous analytics cookie’.

These cookies can tell us whether you have visited the site before. Your browser will tell us if you have these cookies and, if you don’t, we generate new ones.

This allows us to track how many individual users we have, and how often they visit the site. We use them to gather statistics; for example, the number of visits to a page. If you are logged in, we will also know the details you provided for this, such as your username and email address.

On some pages of our website, other organizations may also set their own anonymous cookies. They do this to track the success of their application, or to customize the application for you.

Because of how cookies work, our website cannot access these cookies, nor can the other organization access the data in cookies we use on our website.

For example, when you share an article using a social-media sharing button, respond to a job advertisement or register for an event on Oyster website, the platform that has created the tool may record that you have done this.

When you visit our website and cookies are switched on, we may collect information, including but not limited to: your internet protocol (IP) address, your login information, time zone settings, operating system and platform, information about your visits, including the URL you came from, your country/region, the search terms you used on our website, pages you viewed or searched, page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouseovers), and the methods used to browse away from the page.

It is usually possible to stop your browser accepting cookies, or to stop it accepting cookies from a website. However, this may affect your experience and lower the quality of it if you turn these off.

All modern browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. You can usually find these settings in the ‘options’ or ‘preferences’ menu of your browser. To understand these settings, the following links may be helpful, or you can use the ‘Help’ option in your browser for more details.

Here are some general guides on all things cookies and how they’re used on the internet:

• Microsoft cookies guide
• All About cookies

The IAB has provided the following website to give information specifically about privacy issues around Internet advertising: Your Online Choices site.

For legal information that’s focused on privacy issues, you may find this links useful: The Information Commissioner’s Office.