Cookies
When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your computer, mobile phone or tablet. These are known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.
What are cookies?
Cookies are used to improve services for you by:
- enabling a service to recognise your computer so you don't have to give the same information several times during one task
- recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don't need to do it for every web page requested
- measuring how many people are using services, so that popular services can be made easier and faster to use
- analysing anonymous data to help us understand how people interact with government services so we can make them better
What do cookies look like?
If you click on a cookie you'll see a short string of text and numbers. The numbers are your identification card, which can only be seen by the website server that gave you the cookie.
How to manage your cookies
We will not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information about you. However, if you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by trafficwatchNI, or any other website, you can do this through your browser settings. Your browser is the way you access the internet (for example Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or Safari). The 'Help' function within your browser should tell you how you can restrict or block cookies.
For information on how to restrict or block cookies on the browser of your mobile phone you will need to refer to your handset manual.
Alternatively, you will also find details on how to restrict or delete cookies on a wide variety of browsers, as well as more general information about cookies, on the About Cookies website: www.aboutcookies.org
Please be aware that restricting cookies may impact on the way our website works for you.
How we use cookies
The trafficwatchNI site and some of the tools and services it links to use a number of cookies. These cookies are listed below with more details about why we use them and how long they will last.
Cookies on social networking websites
We have links to social networking websites (for example Twitter). Such websites may place cookies on your computer.
The social networking sites that this website links to are third party sites and this website does not have any control over the way that these sites use your data. You should read their respective privacy policies carefully to find out what happens to any data that is collected when you use these services and to consider whether you want to opt out.
Twitter is a social networking service. Users send short updates, or mini-blogs (known as tweets), that are no more than 280 characters long. You can collect followers and follow other users. You can also tag words and search tags to find out what other people are talking about.
Measuring website usage
We use Google Analytics to collect information about how people use trafficwatchNI. We do this to make sure it's meeting people´s needs and to understand how we could meet those needs better.
Google Analytics stores information about what pages you visit, how long you are on the site, how you got here and what you click on. We do not collect or store your personal details such as your name or address. We cannot identify who you are.
We do not allow Google to use or share any information we collect with other third parties.
| Name | Typical Content | Expires |
|---|---|---|
| _ga | randomly generated number | 2 years |
| _gat | randomly generated number | 1 minute |
| _gid | randomly generated number | 1 day |
For further information on cookies set by Google Analytics.
Remembering your settings
This website uses cookies to remember if you have received the cookie warning message so that this message doesn't appear more than once.
| Name | Typical Content | Expires |
|---|---|---|
| cookieNotification | true | 20 years |
| cookieConsent | true/false | 20 years |
We also set cookies to remember your map area preference.
| Name | Typical Content | Expires |
|---|---|---|
| mapArea | number | 20 years |
Applications that we link to
We link to a number of external applications belonging to this Department. Where a launch page exists for an application, information about Cookies it uses are highlighted on that page.
Third party cookies
Third-party cookies are cookies created by a website other than the one you are currently visiting. We currently embed services from third party websites to provide extra functionality.