Cookies Policy

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. sac.food.gov.uk puts small files (known as ‘cookies’) onto your computer to collect information about how you browse the site.

Cookies are used to:

• measure how you use the website so it can be updated and improved based on your needs
• remember the notifications you’ve seen so that we don’t show them to you again

Cookies on sac.food.gov.uk aren’t used to identify you personally.

Find out more about how to manage cookies (Opens in a new window).

How cookies are used on sac.food.gov.uk

SessionID

Name: JSESSIONID  and PHPSESSID
Purpose: These cookies are used to maintain an anonymous user session by the server.
Expires: Expires after the end of the user session

Measuring website usage (Google Analytics)

We use Google Analytics software to collect information about how you use food.gov.uk. We do this to help make sure the site is meeting the needs of its users and to help us make improvements.

Google Analytics stores information about:

• the pages you visit
• how long you spend on each page
• how you got to the site 
• what you click on while you’re visiting the site

We don’t allow Google to use or share our analytics data.

Universal Analytics

Name: _ga
Purpose: This helps us count how many people visit food.gov.uk by tracking if you’ve visited before
Expires: 2 years

Name: _gid
Purpose: This helps us count how many people visit food.gov.uk by tracking if you’ve visited before
Expires: 24 hours  (3 days for the 'register a food business' service)

Name: _gat
Purpose: Used to manage the rate at which page view requests are made. This cookie does not store any user information,
Expires: The expiry settings are set by Google

Name: acceptAllCookies
Purpose: Used to remember whether or not you clicked accept or don’t accept for optional cookies
Expires: 25 days

Name: connect.sid
Purpose: Used to persist registration data through the 'register a food business' service
Expires: 24 hours

Google Analytics

Name: _utma
Purpose: Like _ga, this lets us know if you’ve visited before, so we can count how many of our visitors are new to food.gov.uk or to a certain page
Expires: 2 years

Name: _utmb
Purpose: This works with _utmc to calculate the average length of time you spend on food.gov.uk
Expires: 30 minutes

Name: _utmc
Purpose: This works with _utmb to calculate when you close your browser
Expires: when you close your browser

Name: _utmz
Purpose: This tells us how you reached food.gov.uk (for example from another website or a search engine)
Expires: 6 months

Cloudflare

Name: __cfduid
Purpose: Set by the CloudFlare to identify trusted web traffic. It does not correspond to any user id in the web application, nor does the cookie store any personally identifiable information.
Expires: 5 years

Further details on cookies set by Cloudflare.

This statement applies across all of our Science Advisory Committee websites.