Our primary goal in collecting personal information from you is to provide you with a smooth, efficient, and personalised experience while using our services. This allows us to provide services and features that most likely meet your needs, and to customise our service to make your experience easier and quicker.
We use a web analytics tool to analyse site usage, how our users arrive at our site, what they do on the site, what browser they are using and on what operating system etc. However, this analytics data, collected via a JavaScript tag in the pages of our site, is not tied to personally identifiable information.
Cookies
We use a number of different cookies on our site. If you do not know what cookies are, or how to control or delete them, then we recommend you visit http://www.aboutcookies.org for detailed guidance.
The following information describes the cookies we use on this site and what we use them for. Currently we operate an ‘implied consent’ policy which means that we assume you are happy with this usage. If you are not happy, then you should either not use this site, or you should delete our cookies having visited the site, or you should browse the site using your browser’s anonymous usage setting (called “Incognito” in Chrome, “InPrivate” for Internet Explorer, "Private Browsing" in Firefox and Safari etc.)
Session Cookies
If applicable, we may use a session cookie to remember your log-in for you. These we deem strictly necessary to the working of the website. If these are disabled then various functionality on the site will be broken. More information on session cookies and what they are used for at http://www.allaboutcookies.org/cookies/session-cookies-used-for.html
Persistent Cookies for Site Analytics and Performance.
Google Analytics – we use this to understand how the site is being used in order to improve the user experience. User data is all anonymous. You can find out more about Google’s position on privacy as regards its analytics service at http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/privacy.html
Social buttons. You may see on pages of the site ‘social buttons’. These enable users to share or bookmark the web pages. There are buttons for: Twitter, Google +1, Facebook ‘Like’, LinkedIn ‘Share’, and StumbleUpon. In order to implement these buttons, and connect them to the relevant social networks and external sites, there are scripts from domains outside of G.P.S. You should be aware that these sites are likely to be collecting information about what you are doing all around the internet, including on our site. So if you click on any of these buttons, these sites will be registering that action and may use that information. In some cases these sites will be registering the fact that you are visiting this site, and the specific pages you are on, even if you don’t click on the button if you are logged into their services, like Google and Facebook. You should check the respective policies of each of these sites to see how exactly they use your information and to find out how to opt out, or delete, such information.
Email tracking
Some emails that we send you have no tracking in at all e.g. service emails with invoices attached. Other emails we send we put in tracking so that we can tell how much traffic those emails send to our site but we do not know who has clicked so the data is anonymous e.g. our daily newsletter. Some emails we can track, at an individual level, whether the user has opened and clicked on the email. We rarely use the latter information at a personal level, rather we use it to understand open and click rates on our emails to try and improve them. Sometimes we do use the personal information e.g. to re-email people who didn’t click the first time. If you want to be sure that none of your email activity is tracked then you should opt out of emails.