Sam Welek

Privacy & Cookie Policy

Last updated 03 Oct 2023

Introduction

This website, samwelek.co.uk (hereinafter: “the website”), is powered by Jekyll and Liquid and is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We use some cookies and scripts on our website to increase functionality and improve performance.

This page aims to outline and detail what cookies and scripts we have created as well as the ones created by third parties and explain how they are used with specific regards to privacy and personal data.

:grey_question: What are cookies?

A cookie is a small file that is sent along with the pages of this website and is stored by your browser on the hard drive of your computer or another device. The information stored therein may be returned to the servers of the relevant third parties during a subsequent visit.

:grey_question: What are scripts?

A script is a piece of code that is used to make our website function properly and interactively. This code is executed locally on your device in your browser.

What Cookies and Scripts have we got in place?

Retention Period: 31 days

This cookie controls whether or not the Cookie and Scripts banner is shown on the bottom of every screen.

The purpose of this is to track whether or not a user has given us their consent to allow certain third party cookies and scripts to run.

If the Decline button on the banner is clicked then we store that approval has not been given and all third party cookies and scripts will be disabled, except for the ones that provide core functionality that without would render the website non functional and useless.

Table of Cookies and Scripts Created and Used by Us

Cookie Name Retention Period (Days) Purpose Required?
cookie-approval-status 31 Consent approval status Yes :heavy_check_mark:

What Third Parties are involved?

Below we have listed the third parties involved with our site to add functionality and improve performance.

CloudFlare

This website also uses CloudFlare for speeding up loading times and does not contain any personally identifiable information, it is used to identify trusted web traffic.

Table of Cookies and Scripts Created & Used by CloudFlare

We have listed the CloudFlare support entry, under the Detailed Link column, for the cookie used to provide a detailed overview.

Cookie Name Retention Period Purpose Detailed Link Required?
__cfduid 30 days Strictly Necessary __cfduid Yes :heavy_check_mark:

Hosting

AWS CloudFront

This website is hosted on AWS CloudFront, a service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that distributes and serves web content in the form of HTML, CSS, and JS to users across the world through a global network of data centres.

CloudFront provides a variety of methods for tracking user activity through the use of Access Logging however to maintain user’s privacy we do not enable this feature and therefore do not store or capture this data for our website.

The only data that can be viewed by us is from the CloudFront Console Reports which include:

  • CloudFront Cache Statistics Reports
    • Data is stored for the last 60 Days
    • Contains statistics pertaining to the number of requests made to the website.
  • CloudFront Popular Objects Report
    • Data stored for the last 60 Days
    • Contains data pertaining to the top 50 most popular web files for the website, these can include any of the HTML, CSS, JS, or image files on the site.
  • CloudFront Top Referrers Report
    • Data stored for the last 60 Days
    • Displays the Top 25 URLs that have referred to us.
    • Contains data pertaining to the referring URL that the user came from (i.e. if a user clicked our link on a Facebook post, it would state the referral came from Facebook).
  • CloudFront Usage Report
    • Data stored for the last 60 Days
    • Contains data pertaining to the amount of data that is transmitted from CloudFront to users.
  • CloudFront Viewers Report
    • Data stored for the last 60 Days
    • Contains data pertaining to the following areas:
      • Devices
        • Mobile, Desktop, Tablet, etc.
      • Browsers
        • Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.
      • Operating Systems
        • Linux, Windows, MacOS, etc.
      • Locations - Stored at the Country/US States granularity
        • United Kingdom, United States, etc.

We have taken every step to anonymise data that is stored in CloudFront and to ensure our user’s privacy is maintained at the highest possible level.

You can view AWS’s full Privacy Policy here.