Cookies Policy

Last updated: November 19, 2019

MetalDetectingWorld.com is all about providing helpful information to people pursuing a hobby of metal detecting. This website uses a set of cookies to ensure that visitors get the best experience.

1. What is a cookie?

A cookie is a small pieces of data - no more than a unique identifier in the form of a text file, that a website asks your browser to store on your computer or mobile device. The cookie allows the website to "remember" your location, preferences, actions, login information and other details over time. Various cookies are also used to protect users' data from unauthorized access, maintain website's functionality, collect Google Analytics data, and serve advertising.

Most browsers support cookies, but users can set their browsers to decline cookies and can delete them whenever they like (more info on this is given below).

Most websites use cookies and they will not cause any harm to your computer or device. Cookies do NOT tell us who you are or give us any personal details about you. If you do not accept the cookies you will still be able to browse our website but some parts of it may not work.

2. What are the different types of cookies?

A cookie can be classified by its lifespan and the domain to which it belongs. By lifespan, a cookie is either a SESSION cookie which is erased when the user closes the browser, or PERSISTENT cookie which remains on the user's computer/device for a pre-defined period of time.

As for the domain to which the cookie belongs, there are either FIRST-PARTY cookies which are issued by the web server of the visited page or THIRD-PARTY cookies issued by the website(s) other than the website being visited. This can happen when the webpage references a file, such as JavaScript, located outside its domain.

3. How do we use cookies?

The website MetalDetectingWorld.com places cookies on your computer as soon as you visit the Site. According to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of May 25th 2018, users in the European Economic Area (EEA) MUST give their consent to our use of cookies. Your consent applies to the www.metaldetectingworld.com domain.

MetalDetectingWorld.com uses cookies for its certain areas and the following purposes:

  • Delivering our website and maintaining its functionality
  • Providing our users' consent session for any cookie level they allow at our website
  • Allowing PHP applications to maintain the main site interface
  • Assisting visitors in navigation
  • Remembering visitors' preferences (such as language)
  • Providing security
  • Analyzing our visitors' use of our content via monitoring the general performance of their experience when on our website
  • Obtaining greater efficiency via improving the usability of our website for all visitors
  • Assisting in posting your content (on PHP pages in 'Reviews Section'), and registration and login (for members accessing paid content on Word Press PHP pages)
  • Providing the Stripe credit/debit card processor's payment gateway powered by the Word Press plugin

As explained in our Privacy Policy, MetalDetectingWorld.com does NOT store information that can identify you personally. The only information that can be analyzed using cookies are the user name, email address and password (for paid membership only), internet protocol (IP address) used to connect your device to the internet, browser type and version.

4. Categories of Cookies

We group our cookies into the below categories:

Strictly Necessary Cookies

These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website. For instance, some gated Word Press pages of MetalDetectingWorld.com will use authentication and security cookies to identify and recognize registered members and to enable them to gain access to paid content upon request. By default Word Press uses cookies for authentication purposes to store session information for logged in users. Apart from these, Word Press plugins can set their own cookies to store different information.

Without Necessary cookies, services you have asked for cannot be provided. Necessary cookies enable core functionality of the Website, and can only be disabled by changing your browser preferences.

These cookies may include the Word Press cookies on the php pages of our website.

Functionality Cookies

These cookies allow our website to remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region) and your account preferences such as your log-in details (for pages with paid content only). Another example is a first party session cookie called _gat, which is used to help Google Analytics manage the number of users on our website. An example of the third party Functionality cookie would be a cookie payment processor - Stripe, that we use collects, uses and processes your information, including payment information, in accordance with their privacy policy

Performance Cookies

These are analytics and research cookies that allow us to collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance, which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. This helps us to improve the way the website works and allows us to test different ideas on the site.

Google Analytics is a web analytics service provided by Google Inc. We use Google Analytics cookies embedded in our website to see how our website is used (track visitor behavior) and measure site performance. The data collected by Google Analytics is used to analyze how frequently the same people revisit the website, how the website is found (for example, from a search engine or from a job board), and which pages are most (and least) frequently viewed.

This information is combined with data from every visitor to create an overall picture of website use, and is never identified individually or personally, therefore, Google Analytics does not store any personal information about our website users. For more info, see Google's Privacy & Terms

Google also uses Security cookies such as SID, SAPISID, APISID, SSID, HSID, SS to authenticate users, prevent fraudulent use of login credentials, and protect user data from unauthorized parties. These cookies contain digitally signed and encrypted records of a user's Google account ID and most recent sign-in time. Some security cookies allows Google to block many types of attack, such as attempts to steal the content of forms that users complete on web pages.

The Preference NID cookie contains a unique ID Google uses to remember the user's preferences and other information, such as the user's preferred language (e.g. English), how many search results the user wishes to have shown per page (e.g. 10 or 20), and whether or not the user wishes to have Google's SafeSearch filter turned on. Cookies of this type are also used by Google to generate images for maps or to generate a CAPTCHA images to help protect websites from spambots.

All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. If you do not allow these cookies, we will not know when you have visited our site.

Targeting Cookies

These cookies are set through our website MetalDetectingWorld.com by a third party - Google Inc. ("Google"). Cookies that the Google AdSense may implement on our Website are of three types of advertising:

  • 1. Contextual advertising implements automated systems that display Generic cookies related to the webpage's content; thus, selecting ads based on keyword targeting, and to improve reporting on the advertisement campaign performance.
  • 2. Remarketing advertising is a type of targeted advertising also called 'Search Engine Marketing' where websites use the IP addresses of computers that have visited their websites to remarket their ad specifically to the user who has previously been on their website as they use websites that are a part of the Google display network, or when searching for keywords related to a product or service on the Google search engine. The Remarketing advertisement employs specific Remarketing cookies.
  • 3. Behaviorally, psycho-graphically or demographically targeted advertising employs specific Behavioral Targeting cookies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant ads on other sites. These cookies uniquely identify your browser and device, record your visit to the website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. If you do not allow these cookies, you will not experience any targeted advertising across different websites. Please note, if you disable these cookies, you will still see the same number of advertisements but they may be less relevant to you. You may continue to see "contextual" advertisements that are not targeted based on your personal information.

To allow advertisers to target their campaigns according to the users' interests based on the sites they visit or the apps they use; thus, providing an improved experience for users and advertisers alike, Google can show Personalized ads along with Non-personalized ads on our website for users in the European Economic Area (EEA).

Non-Personalized Ads
Non-personalized advertising is not based on a user’s past behavior. The non-personalized ads are targeted using contextual information, including coarse (such as city-level) geo-targeting based on current location, and content on the current site or app or current query terms. The non-personalized ads do not use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for ad targeting; however, they do still use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to combat fraud and abuse.

Personalized Ads
Personalized advertising (also called "interest-based advertising") is based on a user’s past behavior. Personalized advertising is a powerful tool that improves advertising relevance for users and increases Return on Investment (ROI) for advertisers. Personalized ads are based on previously collected or historical data to determine or influence ad selection, including a user's previous search queries, activity, visits to sites or apps, demographic information, or location. For example, the collected data may include demographic targeting, interest category targeting, remarketing, etc.

Below is a long list of the commonly-used providers of ad technology that have provided Google with information about their compliance with the EU ePrivacy Directive and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – all of whom also have to comply with Google's data usage policy to ensure publisher data is protected. These ad technology providers (including Google and other ad networks and vendors) may use data about users for the purposes of ads personalization and measurement. This list also includes links to the details provided by each provider that describes their activities.

List of Commonly-Used Providers of Ad Technology

Other methods of targeted advertisement such as Mobile targeting, Technical targeting, Time targeting, Geographical and Location-based targeting and Retargeting may also be implemented by Google Inc. on our website. Google AdSense uses Targeting cookies to make advertising more engaging to users and more valuable to publishers and advertisers.

Sometimes advertising cookies may be set on the domain of the site a user is visiting. In the case of advertising, the Google AdSense serves across the web, and these cookies cannot be read by Google when a user is on a site other than the one on which they were set. They serve purposes such as measuring interactions with the ads on that domain and preventing the same ads from being shown to the website visitors too many times.

Google AdSense also uses cookies to link the user's activity across devices if the user previously signed in to one's Google Account on another device. Google AdSense does this to coordinate the ads the user sees across devices and measure conversion events. These cookies may be set on the following domains: google.com/ads, google.com/ads/measurement, googleadservices.com, and the advertising platform DoubleClick - doubleclick.net.

Cookies themselves contain no personally identifiable information. Depending on the publisher’s and the user’s settings, information associated with cookies used in advertising may be added to the user’s Google Account. For more info, refer to Google's Types of cookies used

You can also control other third party cookies used for the Contextual, Remarketing and/or Behavioral Targeting by adjusting your browser settings (more info on this is given below)

Social Sharing Cookies

Even though social media buttons are present on our website, they are just links to social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest on which our Website is present, and do NOT collect information about your IP address and which page you are visiting on our Website.

Since these buttons on the Site do not set any social sharing cookies on your computer or device, we do not use social sharing cookies at all. And We also do not embed Twitter timelines, buttons and a link to tweets on MetalDetectingWorld.com not to place additional cookies on your device.

5. List of Cookies Used by MetalDetectingWorld.com

The list below describes Necessary, Performance and Targeting cookies and their specific purposes. Please note that not ALL cookies listed below may be used by MetalDetectingWorld.com at the same time, and some simple HTML pages without advertisement, analytics and PHP applications may use NO cookies at all. Also, the cookies may change over time.

NECESSARY Cookies:

  • _ga - analytics cookie; used to distinguish users; metaldetectingworld.com; Google Inc.; expires after 2 years;
  • PHPSESSID - HTTP cookie; used to store session data during a website visit and preserve user's session state across page requests; metaldetectingworld.com; issued by a PHP application; expires at end of session;
  • tarteaucitron - Your visit cookie; used to store your cookie consent session for our site; it contains no information other than whether you have opted in or out for each cookie level; metaldetectingworld.com, expires in 1 year;
  • wordpress_logged_in_[hash] - Word Press Cookie; enabled after login and used to identify a user and indicate when the user logged in; issued by a PHP application; expires in 2 weeks;
  • wp-settings-{time}-[UID] - Word Press Cookie; used to customize the main site interface; issued by a PHP application; expires in 2 weeks;

FUNCTIONALITY Cookies:

  • __stripe_sid - Session cookie; used by Stripe payment gateway to measure web traffic and to also distinguish user's sessions; expires in 30 minutes;
  • __stripe_mid - Session cookie for the Stripe credit / debit card processor; stripe.com; expires in 1 year;
  • m - HTTP cookie; used to aid in fraud detection; m.stripe.com; expires in 10 years;
  • nsr - HTTP cookie; Unclassified; m.stripe.network; expires at end of session;
  • __stripe-js-v3-features__ - Persistent cookie; HTML Local Storage; m.stripe.com; expires in 1 year;

PERFORMANCE Cookies:

a) Google ANALYTICS Cookies:

  • _gat (also _gat_gtag_UA_XXXXXXX-1) - Session cookie; google.com; used to throttle requests; expires in 1-10 minutes;
  • _gid - Session cookie; used to distinguish users; google.com; expires in 24 hours;
  • __utma - Unique visitor cookie; google.com; expires after 2 years from the date it was last refreshed;
  • __utmb - Session cookie; google.com; expires after 30 minutes;
  • __utmc - Session cookie; used to measure conversion events; google.com; expires upon closing the browser window;
  • __utmt - Session cookie; google.com; expires after 10 minutes;
  • __utmv - Visitor Segmentation cookie; google.com; expires after 2 years from the date it was last refreshed;
  • __utmz - Campaign cookie; google.com; expires after 6 months from the date it was last refreshed;

b) Google SECURITY Cookies:

  • HSID - Account ID cookie; used in combination with SID to verify Google user account; google.com; expires in 2 years;
  • SSID - Security cookie; google.com; expires in 2 years;
  • APISID - Security cookie; google.com; expires in 2 years;
  • SAPISID - Security cookie; google.com; expires in 2 years;
  • SS - Account ID cookie; google.com; expires in 2 years;
  • SID - Account ID cookie; contains records of a user's Google account ID and most recent sign-in time; google.com; expires in 2 years;

Google/DoubleClick TARGETING Cookies:

  • NID - Preferences cookie; used to remember user's most recent searches; previous interactions with an advertiser’s ads or search results; and visits to an advertiser’s website; google.com; expires in 6 months;
  • B - Persistent cookie; Pixel Tracker; Unclassified; expires in 1 year;
  • IDE - the main Advertising HTTP cookie; used to show more relevant ads to users and measure conversion events; .doubleclick.net; expires in 2 months;
  • DSID - Advertising HTTP cookie; used for authentication of the device and for re-targeting, optimization, reporting and attribution of online advertising; .doubleclick.net; expires in 2 weeks;

6. How to Block Cookies

If you block the First Party cookies, some areas of the website and analytics of the site's performance will be dysfunctional.

You have the right to decide whether to accept or reject our cookies. Cookies are not dangerous to your computer in any way. They are not executable programs and they cannot install any virus or malware on your computer. But if you still wish to delete the cookies set by MetalDetectingWorld.com then please follow the instructions below.

You can decline some or all cookies if you wish. You can reject the Functionality, Performance and Targeting cookies we use on MetalDetectingWorld.com via the "Cookies Setting Panel" if you click on a "Decline" button or the "Manage Cookies" button (a consent revoking button) located in the lower left corner of the screen. Blocking the Third Party cookies is only possible by blocking whole third-party functionality. This means Google Analytics and AdSense on our website WILL NOT WORK until user manually allows these cookies.

Disabling ALL cookies (including Necessary cookies) we use on our website can be done by changing your browser settings, but, for instance, blocking the First Party cookies can impair your ability to use our website or some of its features.

Most browsers allow you to manage cookie settings. These settings can usually be found in the 'Settings', 'Options' or 'Preferences' menu of your browser. The links below are provided to help you find the instructions, from some common web browser manufacturers directly, how to configure your browser settings*.

* - These links are to third party sites, over which we have no control – no liability can be claimed if they are inaccurate or have been changed. For all other browsers, please look for a "help" function in your browser or contact the browser provider.

You can also delete cookies already stored on your computer; however, blocking and/or deleting cookies on your computer(s) and device(s) may have a negative impact on the usability of many websites.

Changes to This Cookies Policy

Our policies are under continual review. We may, from time to time, update our Cookies Policy. Any such changes will be posted on this page.

Contact

Questions, comments and requests regarding this Cookies Policy should be addressed to mdw2sergei@gmail.com.