Privacy and cookie policies

We take your privacy very seriously. The purpose of this section is to explain what we do and don’t do with regards to tracking visitors, placing cookies on your machine and to make you aware of third party activities which may be important to you, such as the cookies placed by advertisers on this site.

This information relates to this website (you are viewing now) and unless otherwise stated does not apply to our separate Fireworks Forum.

Privacy overview

First and foremost it should be made clear that this website does not require any form of registration to use. For this reason we do not ask for, or require, any personal information from you such as your email address. You are not required to “log in” to access any part of this site.

We do not at this time use any form of explicit tracking or metrics system (such as Google Analytics). Should that change we will amend this section accordingly.

As per accepted and well established industry standards we access statistics from our web server log. This records what pages have been accessed and other information such as your browser, any referring website (the site which linked to us, which you clicked on), the parameters of your search if you come from a search engine (where passed to us by the search engine) and so on.

The web statistics in this respect are a record or log of your visit and this information is aggregated into an abbreviated and condensed form which we use for information and statistical purposes. Practical examples of the use of this information includes seeing what search terms are the most popular, which pages are viewed the most, how long people spend on the site, how much bandwidth is being used and from what broad geographic areas visitors come from. This information does not identify you personally.

For our security and yours, all access to this site (and this applies to nearly every website on the internet) is recorded in the web server logs along with your IP address. We do not drill down statistics in our logs to the IP level and we never divulge IP addresses except where forced to by law or where we are acting in the interests of maintaining or securing this website. For example, in the event of a hacking attempt or other criminal act we may pass on details of the IP address used to the Police. However we do not share logged IP addresses with any third party such as advertisers, for any reason.

If you contact us by email we will not keep a record of your email address except as required in order to respond to your email (where appropriate), to access your email to us and to store your email in our email clients. We do not for example keep a database of emails and we do not send out email newsletters. We will not contact you unless you ask us to.

Cookie policy

As stated above we do not use any form of statistical tracking nor is there a requirement to register or log in to access this site. Therefore our use of cookies is minimal. In particular, we do not intentionally place a cookie on your machine nor do we access or track them ourselves.

We would draw your attention however to the following possible use of cookies here which could be instigated by third party applications or are otherwise beyond our immediate control:

The website “back end” (the software used to power the site) may register a cookie when you visit. This is primarily in order to allow the editor and other contributors to log in and publish content (ie. to remember them and keep them logged in from page to page). It is not used for unregistered and general traffic. It should be perfectly safe for example to block any cookie issued by this site and domain and it should not affect your viewing of the site. We would again emphasise that we do NOT use cookies to track visitors or collect statistics, we do NOT operate any form of shopping trolley or other system that requires your session to be stored and we do NOT modify any information or web pages displayed according to different visitors.

Banners for UKFR sponsors are just graphic banners and are not tracked via cookies.

We would like you to be aware that Google adverts operate in some sections of this website. Google may place cookies on your machine for the purposes of tracking your viewing of adverts (on this and other websites). You should find a link with any such adverts where you can click to see further information from Google and an option to opt out. We have no control over these cookies.

We have been made aware that if you view an embedded YouTube clip that YouTube may place a cookie on your machine. Again we have no control over this but as we do embed YouTube clips here we wanted to make you aware of this.

Advertising and outgoing link policies

We place a very high importance on our independence from the fireworks trade and the fact we do not sell fireworks, either directly or indirectly by commission. To ensure we are seen to be maintaining this policy we do not allow the use of tracked outgoing links to advertisers who place banners with us directly. Although these could be entirely innocent (eg. to track a specific campaign) they could be seen as some form of affiliate code or other tracking. All outgoing links are therefore “clean” of any such tracking codes.

Where adverts change on each page load and those adverts are banners sold directly from UKFR to the advertiser, the advert rotations are created by the web page on a random basis. We do not use any form of tracking (cookie or otherwise) to rotate banners, they are entirely random.

Please note that Google adverts are an exception to this. Google will track and record what adverts are clicked on because the nature of Google’s advertising system means that advertisers pay for clicks and sites hosting adverts receive a commission from this. This tracking is also used to prevent “click fraud”.

This page was last updated in 26 May 2012.