COOKIES

What are Cookies?

Cookies are small text files that can be used by web sites to make a user’s experience more efficient.

When you need to pass some snippet of information to another system to make it do something, how do you do it? If you’re on the Web or some other network, you use a cookie (also known as a magic cookie). The cookie is a text file saved in your browser’s directory or folder and stored in RAM while your browser is running. Most of the information in a cookie is pretty innocuous, but some Web sites use cookies to store personal preferences or tracking data.

The law states that we can store cookies on your machine if they are essential to the operation of this site but that for all others we need your permission to do so.

EAR Records does use some non-essential cookies. We do not do this to track individual users or to identify them, but to gain useful knowledge about how the site is used so that we can keep improving it for our users. Without the knowledge we gain from the systems that use these cookies we would not be able to provide the service we do.

Cookies We Use:

This site uses different types of cookie. Below is a list of cookies that we use. We’ve listed them here so you can choose if you want to opt-out of cookies or not.

Sessions:

Allows EAR Records to store information about your session (referrer, landing page, etc).

Non-Version-Specific Data:

The actual cookies contain hashed data, so you don’t have to worry about someone gleaning your username and password by reading the cookie data. A hash is the result of a specific mathematical formula applied to some input data (in this case your user name and password, respectively). It’s quite hard to reverse a hash (bordering on practical infeasibility with today’s computers). This means it is very difficult to take a hash and “unhash” it to find the original input data.

EAR Records uses the two cookies. If EAR Records recognizes that you have valid, non-expired cookies, you go directly to your Account interface. If you don’t have the cookies, or they’re expired, or in some other way invalid (like you edited them manually for some reason), EAR Records will require you to log in again, in order to obtain new cookies.

Visit:

We have set these to be persistent for 60 minutes from the last visit, these are used by our website’s internal stats tracker to record the number of visits.

Commenters:

When visitors comment at EAR Records’ web site, they too get cookies stored on their computer. This is purely a convenience, so that the visitor won’t need to re-type all their information again when they want to leave another comment. Three cookies are set for commenters:

• Author Comment
• Author Email
• Author Url

The commenter cookies are set to expire a little under one year from the time they’re set.

Personal:

Counts the number of visits to a store by a single customer.

Cart:

Stores information about the contents of your cart.

Unique Token:

This is used to determine if the current visitor has access – when registered with EAR Records you will receive a cookie for this purpose.

Analytics:

We use Google Analytics, a popular web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. Google Analytics uses cookies to help us to analyze how users use the site. It counts the number of visitors and tells us things about their behavior overall – such as the typical length of stay on the site or the average number of pages a user views.

The information generated by the cookie about your use of our website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of our website, compiling reports on website activity and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage.

Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google’s behalf. Google undertakes not to associate your IP address with any other data held by Google.

If you have Adobe Flash installed on your computer (most computers do) and you use EAR Records’s audio or video players, Google Analytics will try to store some additional data on your computer. This data is known as a Local Shared Object or Flash cookie. This helps us to analyze the popularity of our media files. We can count the total number of times each file is played, how many people watch videos right to the end and how many people give up half way through. Adobe’s website offers tools to control Flash cookies on your computer.

If you want to delete any cookies that are already on your computer, please refer to the instructions for your file management software to locate the file or directory that stores cookies. You can access them through some types of browser. Search in your cookie folders for ‘ear’ to find our cookie and the Google Analytics cookie if you wish to delete them.

More information about cookies, including how to block them or delete them, can be found at AboutCookies.Org. Some third party cookies are set by services that appear on our pages. They are set by the operators of that service and are not in our control. They are set by Twitter, Facebook and inShare and relate to the ability of users to share content on this site.

If you want to delete any cookies that are already on your computer, please refer to the instructions for your file management software to locate the file or directory that stores cookies. You can access them through some types of browser. Search in your cookie folders for ‘ear’ to find our cookie and the Google Analytics cookie if you wish to delete them.

More information about cookies, including how to block them or delete them, can be found at AboutCookies.Org.