Cookie

When you visit our site, a cookie (a very small text file) is placed on your machine (if it is accepted), this is to provide you with a personalized experience and to assist in the collection of the site visitation statistics. You may refuse the cookie, if you wish. To do so, you will need to check your browser settings.

Lodestar Research collects certain information about your computer hardware and software, which includes (but is not limited to):

• Your IP address
• Browser type
• Operating system
• Access times
• Referring web site addresses

This information is used for the operation of the service, to maintain quality of the service, and to provide general statistics regarding use of Lodestar Research’s websites. Cookies are also used in connection with the membership of our site. If you choose to not have your browser accept cookies, you will be able to view the majority of our site, however you will not you be able to register as a site member.

Information We Collect

Our primary goal in collecting personal information from you is to provide you with a smooth, efficient, and personalised experience while using our services. This allows us to provide services and features that most likely meet your needs, and to customise our service to make your experience easier and quicker.

To fully use our services, you will need to subscribe as a Member, where you will be required to provide us with your contact information and additional information relating to your professional employment. We automatically track certain information about you based upon your behaviour on our site. We use this information to do internal research on our users’ demographics, interests, and behaviour to better understand and serve our users. We use a web analytics tool to analyse site usage, how our users arrive at our site, what they do on the site, what browser they are using and on what operating system etc. However, this analytics data, collected via a JavaScript tag in the pages of our site, is not tied to personally identifiable information.

Cookies

We use a number of different cookies on our site. If you do not know what cookies are, or how to control or delete them, then we recommend you visit www.aboutcookies.org for detailed guidance.

The following tables describe the cookies we use on this site and what we use them for. Currently we operate an ‘implied consent’ policy which means that we assume you are happy with this usage. If you are not happy, then you should either not use this site, or you should delete Lodestar Research cookies having visited the site, or you should browse the site using your browser’s anonymous usage setting (called “Incognito” in Chrome, “InPrivate” for Internet Explorer, “Private Browsing” in Firefox and Safari etc.)

“Session” Cookies

We use a session cookie to remember your log-in for you and what you’ve put in the shopping basket. These we deem strictly necessary to the working of the website. If these are disabled then various functionality on the site will be broken.
More information on session cookies and what they are used for at www.allaboutcookies.org/About/Cookies/session-cookies-used-for.html

Persistent Cookies for Site Analytics and Performance

Google AdSense – this cookie is used by Google to report to us how the adverts shown on our sites are performing. User data is all anonymous.

You can find out more generally about Google and its policies and principles as regards advertising at www.google.com/policies/privacy/ads/

DoubleClick (Google)

This is very similar to the cookie above (both are owned/controlled by Google) but is specific to the display advertising on our site. User data is anonymous.

As above, you can find out more generally about Google and its policies and principles as regards advertising at www.google.com/policies/privacy/ads/

Google Analytics

We use this to understand how the site is being used in order to improve the user experience. User data is all anonymous. You can find out more about Google’s position on privacy as regards its analytics service at http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/analytics/privacyoverview.html

Web beacons

Our Web pages contain electronic images known as Web beacons (sometimes called single-pixel gifs) and are used along with cookies to compile aggregated statistics to analyse how our site is used and may be used in some of our emails to let us know which emails and links have been opened by recipients. This allows us to gauge the effectiveness of our customer communications and marketing campaigns.

Social buttons

On many of the pages of the site you will see ‘social buttons’. These enable users to share or bookmark the web pages. There are buttons for: Twitter, Google +1, Facebook ‘Like’, LinkedIn ‘Share’, and StumbleUpon. In order to implement these buttons, and connect them to the relevant social networks and external sites, there are scripts from domains outside of Lodestar Research. You should be aware that these sites are likely to be collecting information about what you are doing all around the internet, including on Lodestar Research’s site. So if you click on any of these buttons, these sites will be registering that action and may use that information. In some cases these sites will be registering the fact that you are visiting Lodestar Research, and the specific pages you are on, even if you don’t click on the button if you are logged into their services, like Google and Facebook. You should check the respective policies of each of these sites to see how exactly they use your information and to find out how to opt out, or delete, such information.

External web services

We use a number of external web services on the Lodestar Research site, mostly to display content within our web pages. For example, to display images we often use Flickr; to show videos we use Vimeo and YouTube. This is not an exhaustive or complete list of the services we use, or might use in the future, when embedding content, but these are the most common. As with the social buttons we cannot prevent these sites, or external domains, from collecting information on your usage of this embedded content. If you are not logged in to these external services then they will not know who you are but are likely to gather anonymous usage information e.g. number of views, plays, loads etc.

Email tracking

Some emails that we send you have no tracking in at all e.g. service emails. Other emails we send we put in tracking so that we can tell how much traffic those emails send to our site but we do not know who has clicked so the data is anonymous e.g. our daily newsletter. We use MailChimp as an email service provider, but this may change in the future.

Surveys & Contests

Occasionally our site may request information from users via surveys, contests or for a particular service (e.g. newsletter). Participation in these surveys or contests is completely voluntary and the user therefore has a choice whether or not to disclose this information. Information requested will include contact information (as supplied to the site during registration) and supplementary information on your professional interests, opinions and preferences (e.g. choice of software, working practices, opinions on industry issues, feedback on the Lodestar Research web sites). We will use the contact information to notify winners. We will not publish winners’ details on the site though on request we will provide details of any winner’s name and organization. If the survey or contest has a sponsor then we may share information given by entrants with the sponsor, but only with the user’s consent. Payment Processing. In order to process payments online we require the billing address for the credit card used and our external payment provider requires your credit card details.