This cookie policy explains how the Metropolis group use cookies on its websites. It explains what cookies are used, why they are used and how you can control them.

1. What are Cookies?

Cookies are very widely used by website owners to make their websites work, or to work more efficiently, as well as to provide reporting information. Cookies are written to the hard drive of a web user; they contain no personal information about the website user and only keep a record of the sites visited and actions on the web site.  Some cookies expire after your browser is closed whilst others stay on your hard drive. Cookies set by the Metropolis Group are “first party cookies”, cookies set by other parties other than Metropolis are called "third party cookies".

2. What type of cookies are used?

Strictly Necessary Cookies

These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features. Without these cookies, services you have asked for such as remembering your login details cannot be provided. These cookies cannot be disabled.

Performance Cookies

These cookies collect anonymous information on how you use a website. The data stored by these cookies never shows personal details from which your individual identity can be established. Without these cookies we cannot learn how the website is working to make improvements which improves your browsing experience.

Functionality Cookies

These cookies remember choices you make and then can be used to provide you with an experience more appropriate to your selections and to make the visits more tailored and pleasant. The information these cookies collect may be anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other websites.

Targeting Cookies or Advertising Cookies

These cookies collect information about your browsing habits in order to make advertising more relevant to you and your interests. They are also used to limit the number of times you see an advert as well as help measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. They remember the websites you visit and share that information with advertisers. Third parties may serve cookies on your computer or mobile device to serve advertising through our Websites. These companies may use information about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide relevant advertisements about goods and services that you may be interested in. They may also employ technology that is used to measure the effectiveness of advertisements. This can be accomplished by them using cookies or web beacons to collect information about your visits to this and other sites in order to provide relevant advertisements about goods and services of potential interest to you. The information collected through this process does not enable us or them to identify your name, contact details or other personally identifying details unless you choose to provide these.

Social Media Cookies

These cookies allow you to login and share content or what you’ve been doing on our website with friends on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. These cookies are not within our control. Please refer to the respective privacy policies of the social media provider on how their cookies work.

Both first and third-party cookies and their purpose are described in the table below.

Cookie Description
Strictly Necessary Cookies
__cfduid The cookie is set by CloudFlare The cookie is used to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. It does not correspond to any user ID in the web application and does not store any personally identifiable information.
Functionality cookies
AWSALB This cookie is set by AWS. Amazon Elastic Load Balancing Application Load Balancer (ALB) is a popular AWS service that load balances incoming traffic at the application layer across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, in a region.
MBM-CUT This cookie is associated with the MBM MyAccount area where user authentication and profile management solutions are handled. For example, to facilitate logins to the various services and to securely maintain your personal information.
Analytics
GPS This cookie is set by Youtube and registers a unique ID for tracking users based on their geographical location
__gads This cookie is set by Google and stored under the name doubleclick.com. This cookie is used to track how many times users see a particular advert which helps in measuring the success of the campaign and calculates the revenue generated by the campaign. These cookies can only be read from the domain that it is set on so it will not track any data while browsing through another sites.
AMCV_NNNNNnNNNAdobeOrg This cookie is set by Adobe Experience Cloud. The purpose of this cookie is to allow persistent ID tracking in the 1st-party state and is used as a reference ID if the AMCV cookie has expired.
_ga This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to calculate visitor, session, campaign data and keep track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookie stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to identify unique visitors.
_gid This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to store information of how visitors use a website and helps in creating an analytics report of how the website is performing. The data is collected in an anonymous format.
_gat_UA-NNNNN-NN This is a pattern type cookie set by Google Analytics, where the pattern element on the name contains the unique identity number of the account or website it relates to. It is a variation of the _gat cookie which is used to limit the amount of data recorded by Google on high traffic volume websites.
demdex This cookie is set under the domain demdex.net and is used by Adobe Audience Manager to help identify a unique visitor across domains.
Targeting Cookies or Advertising Cookies
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE This cookie is set by Youtube. Used to track the information of the embedded YouTube videos on a website.
everest_g_v2 The cookie is set under eversttech.net domain. The purpose of the cookie is to map clicks to other events on the client's website.
everest_session_v2 This cookie is used to display personalized and relevant ads to the users and measure the efficiency of the ad campaign.
dpm The cookie is set by demdex.net. This cookie assigns a unique ID to each visiting user that allows third-party advertisers to target users with relevant ads.
_mkto_trk This cookie is associated with an email marketing service provided by Marketo an E-mail Service Provider. This tracking cookie allows the website to link visitor behavior to the recipient of an email marketing campaign, to measure campaign effectiveness.
IDE Stores information about how the user uses the website This is used to present users with ads that are relevant to them according to the user profile.
_banderole_seen This is an advertiser cookie which we use to help us to track the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns.
test_cookie This cookie is set by doubleclick.net. The purpose of the cookie is to determine if the users' browser supports cookies.
Performance Cookies
YSC This cookies is set by Youtube and is used to track the number of views of embedded videos.
_gat This cookie is installed by Google Universal Analytics to throttle the request rate to limit the collection of data on high traffic sites.

3. How do I control cookies?

You have the right to decide whether to accept or reject cookies. You can exercise your cookie preferences by amending your web browser controls. These browser controls will usually be found in the “options” or “preferences” menu in your toolbar. The “help” portion of the toolbar on most browsers will tell you how to stop or manage cookies.  For more information on how to do set browser controls visit https://www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/ or the Information Commissioner's webpage on cookies ico.org.uk/for-the-public/online/cookies/.

We may update this Cookie Statement from time to time in order to reflect, for example, changes to the cookies we use or for other operational, legal or regulatory reasons.

If you have any further questions please email data.privacy@metropolis.co.uk.