Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site.
A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your device (computer, tablet or smart phone) if you agree. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your device’s hard drive.
We use the following cookies:
- Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our website, use a shopping cart or make use of e-billing services.
- Analytical or performance cookies. These allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.
- Functionality cookies. These are used to recognise you when you return to our website. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences.
- Targeting cookies. These cookies record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our website and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests.
You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them in the table below:
| Cookie Title
Cookie Name |
Purpose | More information | Expiry | Type |
| _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 cookies store information anonymously and assign a randomly generated number to identify unique visitors.
|
Read more information from Google. | The longest lasting cookie expires 2 years, 1 day after your last visit to the website., or when you close your browser. | Analytics |
| _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 doing. The data collected including the number visitors, the source where they have come from, and the pages visited in an anonymous form. | Read more information from Google. | 1 day after your last visit | Analytics |
| _gat_gtag_
[Property-ID] |
This cookie is also part of Google Analytics and is used to limit requests (throttle request rate).
|
Read more information from Google. |
1 minute after your last visit |
Analytics |
| __cfduid
|
The cookie is used by cdn services like CloudFlare 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.
|
Read more information from CoudFlare. | 1 month after your last visit |
Necessary |
| __stid
|
The cookie is set by ShareThis. The cookie is used for site analytics to determine the pages visited, the amount of time spent, etc.
|
Read more information from ShareThis | 1 year after your last visit |
Analytics |
| __stidv
|
This cookie is used by ShareThis. This cookie is used for sharing the content from the website to social networks.
|
Read more information from ShareThis | 1 year after your last visit |
Functional |
Please note that the following third parties may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These named third parties may include, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services. These third party cookies are likely to be analytical cookies or performance cookies or targeting cookies:
- CloudFlare
- ShareThis
- Stripe
- Paypal
To deactivate the use of third party advertising cookies, you may visit the consumer page to manage the use of these types of cookies by accessing the Civic Cookie Control (https://www.civicuk.com/cookie-control) facility on our home page www.thegcindex.com
If you want to disable cookies you need to change your website browser settings to reject cookies. How you do this will depend on the browser you use. If you disable cookies, certain sections of our website may not work properly and you may be unable to complete a purchase on our site.