Cookie policy

1. Information about our use of cookies

Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our website.

2. What is a cookie?

A cookie is a very small file of letters and numbers that we put on your device’s browser, if you agree. Cookies often include an anonymous unique identifier. Cookies enable you to get the best out of your visit to our website and improve your enjoyment of our website. They can also make sure the advertising you see is relevant to you.

3. How does New Scientist use cookies?

The cookies we use on our website store information about your visit to our website, such as the date and time of visits, the pages viewed, time spent at our website, and the websites you visited just before and just after our website.

We use the following cookies (as categorised by the International Chamber of Commerce (UK)):

• Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required to operate our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our website, such as the members’ area. They are essential to the operation of our website. These essential cookies will expire 30 days after your last visit to our website.
• Analytical cookies. These cookies allow us, in conjunction with our web server’s log files, to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our website. They provide aggregated information about the number of visits to our website and which parts of our website are most popular. This helps us gather feedback to improve the way our website works and better serve our users and members. For example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily. We use Google Analytics and Profile Cloud to carry out the analytical functions on our website.
• Functionality cookies. These are cookies used to recognise you when you return to our website. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region). These cookies will remain on your device’s browser until you choose to clear them. If you disable these cookies, you will need to re-enter your user details each time you visit our website. We will also no longer be able to personalise the content on our website to your preferences, so you may receive information which is not relevant to your locality, or receive pricing information in a currency which is not your own.
• Targeting cookies including third party cookies and cookies used for advertising purposes. These cookies record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our website and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests. We may also share this information with carefully selected third parties for the same purposes. These cookies help us to determine the effectiveness of our marketing activity. If you go on a web page on our website that contains embedded content, for example from YouTube, you may be sent cookies from these third party websites. We don’t control these cookies so please check the relevant third party’s website for information about how they use cookies. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies. If you do not want these cookies to apply to you, you can disable them. Please see the section 4 below for information about how you can disable cookies. Please see section 5 below for details of the third party cookies that are used on our website.

4. How to control the cookies on your browser

You can control the cookies on your browser in a number of ways.

• Deleting / rejecting cookies…You are able to adjust your device’s browser settings to accept or reject all specific cookies. You can also change your settings so that you are notified every time a cookie is presented to your device. You can change the settings on your device so that all cookies on your device are deleted and no further cookies are permitted on your device. If you do this, your ability to use our website may be affected and you may not find our website as easy to navigate as it was with the cookies in place.
• Disabling cookies… If you disable cookies on your browser settings, you will restrict the cookies that we use to manage our website and this will have an impact on how our website operates.
• Restricting / blocking cookies… If you want to restrict or block the cookies that are placed on your web browser, you can do this through your web browser settings, by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies.
• Changing your cookie preferences when you log into the member’s area of our website… You can also turn off all cookies other than those which are essential to the operation of our website (strictly necessary cookies). By doing this you will still be able to access the member’s area of our website. You can adjust your cookie preferences by logging into the member’s area of our website and changing your cookie preferences in the ‘my account’ section.

5. What specific cookies do we use?

You can find more information about the cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them here.