This site, like many others, uses small files called cookies to help customise your experience. Find out more about cookies and how you can control them.

This page contains information on what ‘cookies’ are, the cookies used by thegolfbusiness.co.uk, how to switch cookies off in your browser, and some useful links for further reading on the subject. If it does not provide the information you were looking for, or you have any further questions about the use of cookies on thegolfbusiness.co.uk, please contact us.

What are ‘cookies’?

‘Cookies’ are small text files that are stored by the browser (e.g. Internet Explorer or Safari) on your computer or mobile phone. They allow websites to store such things as user preferences. You can think of cookies as providing a “memory” for the website, enabling it to recognise a user and respond appropriately.

How does thegolfbusiness.co.uk use cookies?

A visit to a page on thegolfbusiness.co.uk may generate the following types of cookie:

Site performance cookies
Anonymous analytics cookies
Geotargetting cookies
Registration cookies
Advertising cookies
Third party advertising cookies

Site performance cookies

This type of cookie remembers your preferences for tools found on thegolfbusiness.co.uk, so you don’t have to reset them each time you visit.

Anonymous analytics cookies

Every time a user visits our website, web analytics software provided by a third party generates an anonymous analytics cookie.

These cookies can tell us whether or not 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 unique users we have, and how often they visit the site.

Unless you are signed in to the golf business‘ or GreenKeeping website, these cookies cannot be used to identify individuals; they are used for statistical purposes only. If you are logged in, we will also know the details you gave to us for this, such as username and email address.

Geotargetting cookies

These cookies are used by software which tries to work out what country you are in from information supplied by your browser when it requests a web page. This cookie is completely anonymous, and is only used to help target content – such as whether you see our International or Hong Kong home page – and advertising.

Registration cookies

When you register with thegolfbusiness.co.uk, we generate cookies that signal whether you are signed in or not.

Our servers use these cookies to work out which account you are signed in with, and if you are allowed access to a particular service. It also allows us to associate any comments you post with your username.

Advertising cookies

We also use cookies to assist in targeted advertising. We may use cookies set by a third party to more accurately target advertising to you, to show, for example, adverts about french wines to users who have recently read an article about french wines on our site. These cookies are anonymous – they store information about the content you are browsing, but not about who you are.

Third party advertising cookies

A lot of the advertisements you see on thegolfbusiness.co.uk are generated by third parties. Some of these third parties use their own anonymous cookies to track how many people have seen a particular ad, or to track how many people have seen it more than once.

The companies that generate these cookies have their own privacy policies, and the golf business has no access to read or write these cookies. These third party advertising cookies may be used by those third parties to anonymously target advertising to you on other websites, based on your visit to thegolfbusiness.co.uk

Other third party cookies

On some pages of the thegolfbusiness.co.uk, third parties may also set their own anonymous cookies, for the purposes of tracking the success of their application, or customising the application for you. Because of how cookies work, thegolfbusiness.co.uk cannot access these cookies, nor can the third parties access the data in cookies used by thegolfbusiness.co.uk

For example, when you share an article using a social media sharing button on thegolfbusiness.co.uk, the social network that has created the button will record that you have done this.

How do I turn cookies off?

It is usually possible to stop your browser accepting cookies, or to stop it accepting cookies from a particular website. For example, we cannot tell if you are signed in without using cookies, so you would not be able to post comments.

All modern browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. These settings will typically be found in the ‘options’ or ‘preferences’ menu of your browser. In order to understand these setttings, the following links may be helpful, otherwise you should use the ‘Help’ option in your browser for more details.

Cookie settings in Internet Explorer
Cookie settings in Firefox
Cookie settings in Chrome

If you are primarily concerned about third party cookies generated by advertisers, you can turn these off by going to the Your Online Choices site.

Useful links

If you would like to find out more about cookies and their use on the Internet, you may find the following links useful:

Microsoft Cookies guide
All About Cookies
AboutCookies.org
Cookie Central

The IAB has provided the following website to give information specifically about privacy issues around Internet advertising:
youronlinechoices.co.uk/uk

For further legal information about privacy issues, you may find these links useful:

Data Protection Act 1998
The Information Commissioner’s Office