Cookie Policy

We collect information from your visits to our websites and your use of our cloud services and our software products to help us gather statistics about usage and effectiveness, personalise your experience, tailor our interactions with you, and improve our products and services. We use “cookies” to do this.

What are cookies and why are cookies used?

Cookies are used by nearly all websites and do not harm your system. A cookie is a piece of data that a website can send to your browser, which may then be stored on your computer as a tag that identifies your computer. While cookies are often only used to measure website usage (such as number of visitors and duration of visit) and effectiveness (such as topics visitors are most interested in) and to allow for ease of navigation or use and, as such, are not associated with any personal information, they are also used at times to personalise a known visitor’s experience of a website by being associated with profile information or user preferences. Over time this information provides valuable insight to help improve the user experience.

Cookies are typically classed as “session” cookies or “persistent” cookies.

Session cookies help you navigate through the website efficiently, keeping track of your progression from page to page so that you are not asked for information you have already provided during the current visit, or information needed to be able to complete a transaction. Session cookies are stored in temporary memory and erased when the web browser is closed.
Persistent cookies on the other hand, store user preferences for current and successive visits. They are written on your device’s hard disk and are still valid when you restart your browser. We use persistent cookies, for example, to record your choice of language and country location and for Google Analytics.

Cookies can also be categorised as:

Strictly necessary cookies: These cookies are essential to enable you to use the website effectively, such as when buying a product and / or service, and therefore cannot be turned off. Without these cookies, the services available to you on our website cannot be provided. These cookies do not gather information about you that could be used for marketing or remembering where you have been on the internet.
Performance cookies: These cookies enable us to monitor and improve the performance of our website. For example, they allow us to count visits, identify traffic sources and see which parts of the site are most popular.
Functionality cookies: These cookies allow our website to remember choices you make and provide enhanced features. For instance, we may be able to provide you with news or updates relevant to the services you use. They may also be used to provide services you have requested such as viewing a video or commenting on a blog. The information these cookies collect is usually anonymised.

If you want to check or change what types of cookies you accept, this can usually be altered within your browser settings. You can block cookies at any time by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our site.

How to express privacy preferences regarding the use of cookies

When visiting our websites or online services, you may have the possibility to set your preferences regarding cookies and other similar technologies by using the options and tools made available to you by your web browser. If a cookie manager has been implemented by a PDS Group Company, it will be displayed at your first visit to our website.

<!– By clicking 'cookie preferences' at the footer of a PDS Group Company website you can either:

choose to accept the usage of all cookies, which will improve your experience when using our websites or,
choose to accept the usage of only strictly necessary cookies, which can limit some functionalities

–>
<!–

You can find more information on all cookies used by our websites and why we use them, in the table below.

–>

While PDS Group Company websites, online and cloud services at this time do not recognise automated browser signals regarding tracking mechanisms, such as “do not track” instructions, you can generally express your privacy preferences regarding the use of most cookies and similar technologies through your web browser. Look under the heading “Tools” (or similar heading) in your particular browser for information about controlling cookies. In most instances you can set your browser to notify you before you receive a cookie, giving you the option to decide whether to accept it or not. You can also generally set your browser to turn off cookies. Cookies in our software products can be turned off in the product itself. Since cookies allow you to take advantage of some of our websites’ features or features of our software products and cloud services, we recommend that you leave them turned on. If you block, turn off or otherwise reject our cookies, some web pages may not display properly, or you will not be able to, for instance, use any website or cloud services that require you to sign in.

<!–

Cookies used by PDS Group Websites

COOKIE NAME	PROVIDER	PURPOSE	EXPIRY	TYPE	CLASSIFICATION	CLASSIFICATION COMMENT
_ga	pds.group	Registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website.	Persistent (2 years)	HTTP	Performance cookies
_gat	pds.group	Used by Google Analytics to throttle request rate	Session	HTTP	Performance cookies	Opening PDS Group websites does drop a “_gat_gtag_<google analytics application id>” cookie. Hence we can specify the cookie name as _gat*.
_gid	pds.group	Registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website.	Persistent (1 Day)	HTTP	Performance cookies
sc_pdsgroup_cookie_consent & sc_pdsgroup_cookie_deny_consent	pds.group	These are cookies that we create to identify if the user accepted/denied the use of tracking cookies when browsing through the PDS Group websites.	sc_pdsgroup_cookie_consent is a Persistent cookie with a validity of 6 months. sc_pdsgroup_cookie_deny_consent is a Persistent cookie with a validity of 3 months.	HTTP	Strictly necessary cookies	Custom functionality used to identify if the user accepted/denied the use of tracking cookies when browsing through the PDS Group websites.
__RequestVerificationToken	pds.group	This is an ASP.Net anti-forgery token	Session	HTTP	Strictly necessary cookies	Without this, form submission functionality across PDS websites will not work
ASP.NET_SessionId	pds.group	A .NET cookie that gives the user a unique session ID. It is deleted when the session is terminated (when the browser is closed) and does not collect or store any personally identifiable information about you.	Session	HTTP	Strictly necessary cookies
SC_ANALYTICS_SESSION_COOKIE	pds.group	Analytics cookie; uses a unique GUID (id)to track user behaviours through the site. No personal identification is collected or stored	Session	HTTP	Functionality cookies
SC_ANALYTICS_GLOBAL_COOKIE	pds.group	Analytics cookie; uses a unique GUID (id)to track user behaviours through the site. No personal identification is collected or stored	Persistent (10 years)	HTTP	Performance cookies
<website name>#lang	pds.group	Cookie generated to display content in specified language. No personal identification is collected or stored	Session	HTTP	Strictly necessary cookies
ARRAffinity	pds.group	Application Request Routing decides which available instance the current request must go to and serves the request to the Web App Server instance, in the process, attaching this ARRAffinity cookie to the request. This cookies is necessary for a scaled application farm to work properly. No personal information is collected or stored.	Session	HTTP	Strictly necessary cookies

–>

<!–

Last Updated: September 2018

–>

Cookie Policy

What are cookies and why are cookies used?

Cookies are typically classed as “session” cookies or “persistent” cookies.

Cookies can also be categorised as:

Performance cookies: These cookies enable us to monitor and improve the performance of our website. For example, they allow us to count visits, identify traffic sources and see which parts of the site are most popular.

How to express privacy preferences regarding the use of cookies

choose to accept the usage of all cookies, which will improve your experience when using our websites or,

choose to accept the usage of only strictly necessary cookies, which can limit some functionalities

You can find more information on all cookies used by our websites and why we use them, in the table below.

Cookies used by PDS Group Websites

_ga

pds.group

Registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website.

Persistent (2 years)

HTTP

Performance cookies

_gat

pds.group

Used by Google Analytics to throttle request rate

Session

HTTP

Performance cookies

Opening PDS Group websites does drop a “_gat_gtag_<google analytics application id>” cookie. Hence we can specify the cookie name as _gat*.

_gid

pds.group

Registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website.

Persistent (1 Day)

HTTP

Performance cookies

sc_pdsgroup_cookie_consent & sc_pdsgroup_cookie_deny_consent

pds.group

These are cookies that we create to identify if the user accepted/denied the use of tracking cookies when browsing through the PDS Group websites.

sc_pdsgroup_cookie_consent is a Persistent cookie with a validity of 6 months.

sc_pdsgroup_cookie_deny_consent is a Persistent cookie with a validity of 3 months.

HTTP

Strictly necessary cookies

Custom functionality used to identify if the user accepted/denied the use of tracking cookies when browsing through the PDS Group websites.

__RequestVerificationToken

pds.group

This is an ASP.Net anti-forgery token

Session

HTTP

Strictly necessary cookies

Without this, form submission functionality across PDS websites will not work

ASP.NET_SessionId

pds.group

A .NET cookie that gives the user a unique session ID. It is deleted when the session is terminated (when the browser is closed) and does not collect or store any personally identifiable information about you.

Session

HTTP

Strictly necessary cookies

SC_ANALYTICS_SESSION_COOKIE

pds.group

Analytics cookie; uses a unique GUID (id)to track user behaviours through the site. No personal identification is collected or stored

Session

HTTP

Functionality cookies

SC_ANALYTICS_GLOBAL_COOKIE

pds.group

Analytics cookie; uses a unique GUID (id)to track user behaviours through the site. No personal identification is collected or stored

Persistent (10 years)

HTTP

Performance cookies

<website name>#lang

pds.group

Cookie generated to display content in specified language. No personal identification is collected or stored

Session

HTTP

Strictly necessary cookies

ARRAffinity

pds.group

Session

HTTP

Strictly necessary cookies

Last Updated: September 2018

Last Updated: February 2022

Persistent
(2 years)

Persistent
(10 years)