Cookie Policy



This Cookies Policy provides you with information on what cookies may be set when you visit the USP website and how you can manage them.

Please note: this is our initial policy and what we see as the 1st stage of achieving privacy compliance for all visitors to our site (including Opt In / Opt Out). This is an evolving area of the law and we at USP Networks take our obligations to treat our customers very seriously. Therefore, we’re not just meeting our legal compliance obligations, but we also aim to be as open and transparent in delivering our services to you as possible.

Apart from the additional information provided by this update, the operation of the www.usp.net website has not changed or been modified. The detail contained within this page is provided to make sure you’re fully aware of the cookies we have in use, allowing you to make an informed choice about your continued acceptance of cookies.

We are currently examining all elements of our web operations and working on a 3-stage approach to meet the legal requirement to protect your privacy online — we want you to be 100% confident in using our site, and for you to be more than satisfied that your privacy is important to us.

The 1st stage is all about us providing you with the detail around the cookies we use. The 2nd stage is about internal change across our business – to educate staff as to the importance and understanding of online privacy, together with the updating of our internal policies and procedures. The 3rd stage is making sure that all of our suppliers (internal and external) disclose the detail of any likely impact that their products and services could have on your privacy. There are a number of areas of our business under review and, where required, we may change our operating practices, technology and the terms and conditions on which we supply our products to you.

Currently, across www.usp.net for various reasons we make use of cookies technology to help manage the site and your visitor experience.

A cookie is a small text file that is saved to the hard drive of your computer when you use a website. Our website use both session and persistent cookies. Session cookies are transferred to your computer only for the duration of your visit to our website. Session cookies help you to move round our website faster and, if you are a registered customer, they allow us to give you information relevant to the services you receive. These cookies automatically expire when you leave our website or shut down your browser. Persistent cookies are cookies that stay on your computer permanently until you manually delete them.

We may use persistent cookies to:

  • recognise you as an individual customer when you log on to our website;
  • identify your settings if you have set up a customised homepage;
  • track links you take to our website from other websites;
  • track the number of times you visit particular pages and advertisements; and
  • control how often you see particular content or information, including notices and advertisements on our website.

For more information about cookies generally and how they work, please see: www.allaboutcookies.org

  • Cookies set across our site, set by our 3rd-party suppliers or us, can be in the form of session or persistent cookies, and may use different technologies, such as JavaScript or Flash. If you would like to 'opt-out' of the cookies from our site, this can be accomplished on a cookie-by-cookie basis subject to browser settings. You may limit site operation or functions if you limit cookies, and if you delete all your cookies you may have to update your preferences with us next time you visit.

To make sure you are fully informed of all the cookies we are using (to the point of the last review), our site has been independently audited by Cookie Reports Limited.

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites

Our cookies help us:

  • Make our website work as you'd expect
  • Remember your settings during and between visits
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
  • Continuously improve our website for you
  • Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do)

We do not use cookies to:

  • Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
  • Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
  • Pass data to advertising networks
  • Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
  • Pay sales commissions

You can learn more about all the cookies we use below​​​​​​​

If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.​​​​​​​

 

We use cookies to make our website work including:

  • Remembering your search settings

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.​​​​​​​

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following which use cookies:

Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties​​​​​​​

So you can easily "Like" or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site.

Cookies are set by:

The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.​​​​​​​

We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn't working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called “analytics” programs also tell us if how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before helping us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of marketing spend.

We use:​​​​​​​

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our's and a large proportion of the world's websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites

It may be that you concerns around cookies relate to so called "spyware". Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. 

Name of cookie Type of cookie Reason for use of cookie Level of privacy/
tracking
Description
__utma Session cookies Analytics Low to Medium This cookie is used to analyse
customer behaviour. 
This cookie is set by
www.google.com/analytics
 __utmb Session cookies Analytics Low to Medium  This cookie is used to analyse
customer behaviour. 
This cookie is set by
www.google.com/analytics
 __utmc Session cookies Analytics Low to Medium  This cookie is used to analyse
customer behaviour. 
This cookie is set by
www.google.com/analytics
__utmz Session cookies Analytics Low to Medium This cookie is used to analyse
customer behaviour. 
This cookie is set by
www.google.com/analytics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parts of our site may make use of a shopping cart or web forms technology that at times has to make use of cookies. Any used on a permanent basis are detailed in the cookies table. From time to time we (temporarily) add functionally to our site e.g. surveys, comparisons etc, that may also use cookies. Often these come from 3rd parties – in these circumstances we will endeavour to make sure that full disclosure of the nature of any such cookies is made.​​​​​​​

Across www.usp.net  we make use of Flash files. These present information, allow integration with 3rd parties (such as YouTube) and can offer a richer online experience. Flash files can however store cookie-like data on your computer, known as "Local Shared Objects". 

Currently technology is limited in its ability to review the 'inner workings' of Flash files. We have strived to identify any Flash elements that are likely to set cookies but, at this point in time, we cannot guarantee the status of every Flash file.

Adobe offer a tool to monitor, opt out and remove 'Flash cookies' which is available at:

  1. Manage, disable Local Shared Objects
  2. Global Storage Settings Panel​​​​​​​

Information about cookies

Useful information about cookies can be found at:
http://www.allaboutcookies.org

Internet Advertising Bureau

A guide to behavioural advertising and online privacy has been produced by the internet advertising industry which can be found at:
http://www.youronlinechoices.eu

International Chamber of Commerce United Kingdom

Information on the ICC (UK) UK cookie guide can be found on the ICC website section:
http://www.international-chamber.co.uk/our-expertise/digitaleconomy