The European Union [bless its cotton socks] forces all websites of companies selling to citizens from within the EU to explain what cookies are. Seriously. Not making this up.. So all visitors from the EU see all these warnings about cookies, and start thinking that they may be bad things. They are not - at least not inherently. However, we like to comply with laws so here you will find an explanation of what cookies are and how we use them. Not the most riveting of stuff, but here we are…
Seriously though, if you like the idea of finding out more about cookies, or anything else that has to do with tracking, please feel free to contact us. At the end of the day Upgrade Two Ltd. (that is us) is a company that is build from the need to responsibly (and in a manner that will never betray your trust) track unique visitor actions through cookies. So we know our stuff, and we should be able to explain things quite nicely, I would hope! Sooooo....
WHAT ARE COOKIES?
Cookies are small text files that contain a string of characters... (like: "abdcddedffedddfggghei".. or similar). These mindless little strings of characters (simple text) are stored in a safe place on your browser (especially provided by your browser, exactly because they are fine to be there) and are used by websites that are interested in tracking your behaviour and figure things out. Most of these things tend to be done for the benefit of the visitors, like letting the website owner know when you visited, if you are a new visitor etc. So pretty much that is it: pieces of text that are stored on your browser when you visit, use to identify your browser (which is not the same as saying, ‘used to identify you’)!
WHAT ARE WE DOING WITH ‘EM COOKIES THEN?
Although in the wilderness of the internet cookies are used primarily for tracking users to offer advertising, less annoying people (like us) only use cookies to personalise your experience and for reporting reasons (I should stress: ANONYMOUS reporting reasons - as the cookie doesn't know who you are; so we don't know who you are either. Unless you buy something from us on this website, in which case we will know who you are and we will be able to associate the visit with the purchase.. but currently you can't buy anything on this website, so nothing to worry there.
In any case, when we drop you a cookie and you re-visit, he cookie just says to our systems "hi, it's abdcddedffedddfggghei from before.. remember me? And our system says "hi abdcddedffedddfggghei.. I remember last time you were interested in upgrades and pre-arrival check-in - which is cool of you. (please don’t blame me for the script here, discussions between computers aren't always fascinating...).
We should mention that also, we have used the help of a great company called Squarespace for the template of this website. They occasionally also use such cookies to identify if someone has come back within thirty days or so. You may want to have a visit on their website (www.squarespace.com) for exactly what they do with cookies, but we are fairly sure that they haven't left any rogue ones on our website... so we should be fine there as well.
Finally, we have set up Google Analytics to track which pages you visit, so we can understand what is interesting to our visitors and eventually properly improve this website. [If we didn't do this, we would just have to go around doing whatever the boss says about our website design, and that is not good for anyone.. trust me on this.]
Right. So, to be clear:
Cookies on this website will never be used to identify you personally. [Typically, cookies by themselves and without special effort by the website owners, can't do that anyway].
Cookies that are picked up by your browser on this website, are not used anywhere else. So you can be sure there will be no advertising shoved under your nose as a result of our cookies. Not if we can help it. Which we can. Because we don't give any information relating to our website to anyone outside our partners mentioned above - even the anonymous stuff.
Cookies here don't have any calories. Or GM stuff. They are green, and as CO2 goes, we don't think they produce much.
We aren't using cookies for anything else. At all. Whatsoever. Apart with our tea sometimes - but that is another story.
There. This is it. Let it be known that Upgrade Two Ltd. happily complies with EU law.
If you remember something from your visit to this page, please make it this: Cookies by themselves aren't bad things. Cookies can - and usually do - make your experience on various websites better. Honestly. But, as with all great things, naughty people may use them and abuse them to profit, and to make your experience with the internet less cool.
If you still don't want our cookies, well, either turn them off (please google how you can do this) or kindly make your excuses and politely go somewhere else, because if cookies bother you, you are likely to find us annoying anyway. And I say this to thee with the best intentions.
With all our love love, [seriously, we are overly excited when people visit this website. So yes, we love you].
The Upgrade2 Team