We use cookies and similar tools across our websites to improve their performance and enhance your user experience. This policy explains how we do that.
What are cookies?
Cookies are small text files which a website may put on your computer or mobile device when you first visit a site or page. The cookie will help the website, or another website, to recognise your device the next time you visit. Web beacons or other similar files can also do the same thing. We use the term “cookies” in this policy to refer to all files that collect information in this way.
Cookies serve many functions. For example, they can help us to remember your username and preferences, analyse how well our website is performing, or even allow us to recommend content that we believe will be most relevant to you.
Certain cookies contain personal information – for example, if you click on “remember me” when logging in, a cookie will store your username. Most cookies won’t collect information that identifies you, and will instead collect more general information such as how users arrive at and use our websites, or a user’s general location.
What sort of cookies does BLME use?
Generally, our cookies perform up to three different functions:
- Essential Cookies
Some cookies are essential for the operation of our website. For example, some cookies allow us to identify users that have requested and received approval to access restricted areas of the website. If a user opts to disable these cookies, the user will not be able to access all of the content that they have signed up to access.
- Performance Cookies
We utilise other cookies to analyse how our visitors use our websites and to monitor website performance. This allows us to provide a high quality experience by customising our offering and quickly identifying and fixing any issues that may arise. For example, we might use performance cookies to keep track of which pages are most popular, which method of linking between pages is most effective, and to determine why some pages are receiving error messages. We might also use these cookies to highlight articles or site services that we think will be of interest to you based on your usage of the website.
Like many companies, we use Google Analytics to help us monitor our website traffic. We may also use third party cookies to help us with market research, revenue tracking, improving site functionality and monitoring compliance with our terms and conditions.
Essential cookies |
||||
| Cookie name | Duration | Description | Cookie type | Cookie owner |
| ASP.NET_SessionId | Session | General purpose platform session cookie, used by sites written with Miscrosoft .NET based technologies. Usually used to maintain an anonymised user session by the server. | First_party | BLME |
| RequestVerificationToken | Session | This is an anti-forgery cookie set by web applications built using ASP.NET MVC technologies. It is designed to stop unauthorised posting of content to a website, known as Cross-Site Request Forgery. It holds no information about the user and is destroyed on closing the browser. | First_party | BLME |
| ASP.NET_SessionId | Session | General purpose platform session cookie, used by sites written with Miscrosoft .NET based technologies. Usually used to maintain an anonymised user session by the server. | Third_party | Prepaid Financial Services |
| ARRAffinity | Session | This cookie is set by websites run on the Windows Azure cloud platform. It is used for load balancing to make sure the visitor page requests are routed to the same server in any browsing session. | First_party | BLME |
| ARRAffinitySameSite | Session | When using Microsoft Azure as a hosting platform and enabling load balancing, this cookie ensures that requests from one visitor browsing session are always handled by the same server in the cluster. | First_party | BLME |
| _GRECAPTCHA | 6 months | Used to distinguish humans | Third_party | |
Performance cookies |
||||
| Cookie name | Duration | Description | Cookie type | Cookie owner |
| ai_session | 30 min | This cookie name is associated with the Microsoft Application Insights software, which collects statictical usage and telemetry information for apps built on the Azure cloud platform. This is a unique anonymous session identifier cookie. | First_party | BLME |
| ai_user | 1 year | This cookie name is associated with the Microsoft Application Insights software, which collects statictical usage and telemetry information for apps built on the Azure cloud platform. This is a unique user identifier cookie enabling counting of the number of users accessing the application over time. | First_party | BLME |
| _gat | 1 min | Used by Google Analytics to store and count pageviews | Third_party | |
| _gid | 1 day | Used by Google Analytics for distinguishing users | Third_party |
Can a website user block cookies?
As we’ve explained above, cookies help you to get the most out of our websites. However, if you do wish to disable our cookies then please follow the instructions on our “How to manage cookies” page.
Please remember that if you do choose to disable cookies, you may find that certain sections of our website do not work properly.