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

This page contains information on what ‘cookies’ are, the cookies on this site, how to switch cookies off in your browser, how to specifically disable third party advertising cookies, 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 Earth’s Attractions, please email earthsattractions@gmail.com.

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 recognize a user and respond appropriately.

How does Earth’s Attractions use cookies?

A visit to a page on this site may generate the following types of cookie:

• Site performance cookies
• Anonymous analytics cookies
• Geotargeting cookies
• Registration cookies
• Advertising cookies
• Third party advertising cookies

Site performance cookies

This type of cookie remembers your preferences for tools found on this site, so you don’t have to re-set them each time you visit. Examples include:

• video streaming speeds that are compatible with your browser.

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 this site, 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.

Geotargeting 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 and advertising.

Registration cookies

When you register with on our site, 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.

If you have not selected ‘keep me signed in,’ your cookies get deleted when you either close your browser or shut down your computer. While you are signed into either of the sites, we combine information from your registration cookies with analytics cookies, which we could use to identify which pages you have seen on our site as an individual.

Advertising cookies

These cookies allow us to know whether or not you’ve seen an advert or a type of advert, and how long it is since you’ve seen it. 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 holidays to users who have recently visited the travel section of our site. These cookies are anonymous – they store information about the content you are browsing, but not about who you are.

We 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 this site, and will serve targeted advertising based on this information.

Third party advertising cookies

A lot of the advertisements you see on this site 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 we have 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 on this site.

Other third party cookies

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

For example, when you share an article using a social media sharing button on this site, 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 settings, 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
• Cookie settings in Safari web and iOS.

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.

You can also visit the trade body representing these advertising platforms for more information: Network Advertising Initative. They have provided a one-stop place that gathers all of the opt-out controls. Please bear in mind that there are many more networks listed on this site than those that we use at Earth’s Attractions. //networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp

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