Cookie Policy

How technology helps make our site perform best for you.

Website Cookie Policy

OUR USE OF COOKIES

We use cookies on our site to create a secure and effective website for all visitors to our website.

Cookies allow you to choose log-in preferences, have the site remember your settings where applicable and also provide anonymous statistics to enable us to continually improve our website to give you the best possible experience. Please note:

We never use the data gathered through cookies to contact you via post, email or telephone
We never share personal information gathered through cookies
The cookies we use are completely safe and secure

WHAT ARE COOKIES?

Cookies are small text files that are sent to and stored on your computer, smartphone or other device for accessing the internet, whenever you visit a website. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user’s device. We use cookies for a variety of reasons, such as to determine preferences and to let visitors navigate between pages efficiently.

WHERE WE SEND YOUR DATA

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

MEDIA

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

COMMENTS

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

COOKIES

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year. If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser. When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed. If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

EMBEDDED CONTENT

Articles on this site may include embedded content [eg. videos, images, articles, etc.]. Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website. These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

MANAGING COOKIE SETTINGS

The browsers of most computers, smartphones and other web-enabled devices are typically set up to accept cookies.

If you wish to amend your cookie preferences for this website or any other websites, you can do this through your browser settings.

Your browser’s ‘help’ function will tell you how to do this.

Please be aware that cookies are often used to enable and improve certain functions on our website and if you choose to deactivate cookies, it may affect your ability to view our website properly.

DATA RETENTION

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website, we also store the personal information provided in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

GOOGLE WEB FONTS

For uniform representation of fonts, this page uses web fonts provided by Google. When you open a page, your browser loads the required web fonts into your browser cache to display texts and fonts correctly.

For this purpose your browser has to establish a direct connection to Google servers. Google thus becomes aware that our web page was accessed via your IP address. The use of Google Web fonts is done in the interest of a uniform and attractive presentation of our plugin. This constitutes a justified interest pursuant to Art. 6 (1) (f) DSGVO.

If your browser does not support web fonts, a standard font is used by your computer. Further information about handling user data, can be found here and in Google’s privacy policy.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Should you have a question(s) about any aspect of the FOSMS website, need further information about our cookie policy in general, or if you no longer wish to receive the information that you have requested, please contact us and your enquiry will be dealt with accordingly.