Cookie Policy

It sits alongside our Privacy Policy, which explains more fully what personal information we handle and what rights you have over it. Where this policy uses the term "personal information", it has the same meaning as in the Privacy Policy.

This policy covers our website. It does not cover the Brightside platform that our customers' employees log into — that processing is carried out on behalf of the employer, and is described in the Privacy Policy and the Employee Terms of Use.

1. What these technologies are

A cookie is a small text file placed on your device when you visit a website. Cookies let a site recognise your device on a later visit, remember your preferences, and understand how the site is used.

We also use technologies that work similarly but are not cookies:

• Local storage — data stored in your browser that, unlike a cookie, is not sent with every request.
• Pixels and tags — (sometimes called web beacons or clear GIFs) tiny images or snippets of code embedded in a page or an email that record that it was loaded.
• Software development kits and tag managers — code that loads and manages other technologies on our behalf.

In this policy, "cookies" means all of the above unless we say otherwise.

2. Why we use them

We group the technologies we use into four categories.

Strictly necessary. Required for the Site to work and for its security — for example remembering your cookie choices, balancing load, and protecting against abuse. These cannot be switched off through our banner, because the Site cannot function without them.

Preferences and functionality. Remember choices you make, such as your language, so the Site behaves consistently between visits.

Analytics and performance. Tell us how the Site is used — which pages are visited, how people arrive, where they encounter difficulty — so we can improve it. This category includes session recording, described separately in Section 4 because it is more intrusive than ordinary analytics.

Advertising and marketing. Measure the performance of our advertising campaigns, attribute enquiries to the campaign that produced them, and allow advertising platforms to show our ads to people who have visited the Site. These are set by third-party advertising networks and can be used to build a profile of your interests across different websites.

3. The technologies we use

The table below lists what we currently use. It is accurate as at the date at the top of this policy. Durations are set by the provider and may change; where a provider changes its own behaviour, the actual lifetime may differ from what is stated here.

Strictly necessary

Analytics and performance

Advertising and marketing

Advertising providers act as independent controllers, or as joint controllers with us, for the data they collect through these technologies. LinkedIn and Brightside are joint controllers for the conversion and audience data collected through the Insight Tag. Their own notices explain what they do with it:

• Google — policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites
• Microsoft — privacy.microsoft.com/privacystatement
• Meta — facebook.com/privacy/policy
• Reddit — reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy
• LinkedIn — linkedin.com/legal/privacy-policy and its cookie table
• G2 — g2.com/static/privacy
• Amplitude — amplitude.com/privacy

A note on G2. The G2 technology is listed here even though it stores nothing on your device, because it still transmits information about your visit — the address of each page you view and your IP address — to a third party. Storing nothing means it falls outside the rules on cookies, but the transmission is still processing of personal information, so we disclose it and treat it as requiring your consent alongside the rest of this category.

4. Session recording

Two of the tools above — Amplitude Session Replay and Microsoft Clarity — do more than count page views. They record a reconstruction of your visit: the pages you saw, how you moved and scrolled, and where you clicked.

We use this to find parts of the Site that confuse people or fail on particular devices.

These tools are configured to mask text you type into form fields, and we do not use them to record passwords or payment details. They still capture more than ordinary analytics, which is why we treat them as requiring your consent and describe them separately here.

Microsoft Clarity is connected to our Microsoft Advertising account. It shares the same tag identifier as the advertising technology listed in Section 3, which means what Clarity records about your visit is also available to Microsoft for measuring our advertising, not only for our own usability work. If you want the recording but not the advertising use, that separation is not available to us — so declining either the analytics or the advertising category will switch Clarity off.

If you do not want your session recorded, decline the analytics category in the cookie banner, or use the provider opt-outs in Section 6.

5. How we ask for your consent

Except for strictly necessary technologies, we place cookies only where you have consented.

When you first visit the Site you are shown a cookie banner. You can accept all categories, reject the non-essential ones, or choose per category. Your choice is stored in your browser and applied on later visits.

You can change your mind at any time by reopening the cookie settings from the banner or the link in the Site footer, or by clearing the cookies and local storage for brside.com in your browser, which makes the banner appear again.

Global Privacy Control. If your browser or an extension sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as a refusal of analytics and advertising technologies and do not load them, whatever the banner would otherwise have offered you. You do not need to interact with the banner for this to take effect.

Withdrawing consent does not affect processing that already took place while consent was in force.

6. Other ways to control cookies

Your browser. Most browsers let you see what cookies are set, delete them, and block them — either altogether or by site. The relevant setting is usually under Privacy or Security. Blocking all cookies will stop parts of the Site from working. General guidance is at allaboutcookies.org.

Provider opt-outs.

• Google Analytics — the browser opt-out add-on
• Microsoft Clarity — see Microsoft's privacy statement
• LinkedIn — if you have a LinkedIn account, the advertising controls in your account settings; LinkedIn also offers an opt-out for people without an account through its cookie policy
• Advertising networks generally — Your Online Choices (Europe), the Network Advertising Initiative, and the Digital Advertising Alliance

Email pixels. Marketing emails we send may contain a pixel that tells us whether the message was opened. Setting your email client to block remote images, or to display plain text only, stops this.

Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track. Browsers differ in how they signal a preference not to be tracked, and there is no common standard for how sites must respond. Where your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as an objection to advertising and analytics cookies.

7. Changes to this policy

We update this policy when the technologies we use change. The date at the top shows when it was last revised. Where a change materially affects how we use cookies, we will ask for your consent again through the banner.

8. Questions

support@brside.com

If you are in the EEA or the UK, you may also contact our Article 27 representative, DataRep — see Section 12 of our Privacy Policy.