What are cookies?
Cookies are a kind of short-term memory for the web. They are small files stored in your browser and enable a site to 'remember' little bits of information between pages and visits. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to remember you, either for the duration of your visit (using a 'session cookie') or for repeat visits (using a 'persistent cookie').
Cookies do lots of different jobs to make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier. They let you navigate between pages efficiently, store your preferences, and generally improve your experience of a website. The use of cookies and similar technologies has for some time been commonplace and cookies in particular are important in the provision of many online services.
How ACRO uses cookies
Like many sites, we sometimes place cookies on your computer or mobile device. The cookies we use can’t be used to identify you personally and can’t harm your computer or device. We don’t sell the information collected by cookies, nor do we disclose the information to third parties.
Our site is maintained using the Kentico content management system. The following cookies are set by Kentico to deliver you our web pages:
| Name |
Default expiration time |
Description |
| cookie-policy |
1 year |
This cookie is used to record whether the cookie policy is accepted by the current user. |
| CMSPreferredCulture |
1 year |
This cookie contains data about the current culture of the website. |
We use the Google Analytics tool to track overall browsing patterns on our website. The tool helps us to identify the most popular pages and links, and gives us broad demographic information about our visitors. We cannot personally identify any user with these cookies, and Google Analytics does not collect any personal information. For more information, please see the Google privacy policy.
The following cookies are set by Google Analytics:
| Name |
Default expiration time |
Description |
| _utma |
2 years |
This randomly generated number is used to determine unique visitors to our site. |
| _utmb |
30 mins |
This randomly generated number works with _utmc to calculate the average length of time users spend on our site. |
| _utmc |
End of browser session |
This randomly generated number works with _utmb to calculate when you close your browser. |
| _utmz |
6 months |
This is a randomly generated number and information about how the site was reached (e.g. direct or via a link, organic search or paid search). |
| _utmv |
2 years from set/update |
This is used for user-custom variables to segment different groups of users. We do not currently use custom variables. |
In addition to the above cookies used by the Ektron CMS and Google Analytics, our website uses the following cookies:
| Name |
Default expiration time |
Description |
| ASP.NET_SessionId |
End of browser session |
This cookie is the default one used by ASPNET to uniquely identify the user's session on the site and relates the visitor's unique session to server side data. |
| ACRO_ONLINEAPP |
1 hour, or after successful payment |
This cookie is used to store internal ID numbers for use with processing online application form sessions. |
What to do if you don’t want cookies to be set
If you don’t want cookies to be placed on your computer or mobile device you can change your browser settings so that it notifies you when cookies are sent, or you can refuse cookies altogether. You can also delete cookies that have already been set.
However, if you do this then it may impact your experience of the site and the services we offer. If you use our Police Certificates, subject access or ICPC service and refuse cookies then our online application will not work.