Welcome to our website! We’re so happy to have you. To make sure your experience on our website is as pleasant and positive as possible, we have to use cookies. You can read all about how cookies work on this page.
What are cookies?
A cookie is a small text file that is saved on your smartphone, tablet or computer. The information in this text file is used for functional, commercial or statistical purposes. We will explain the differences between these three things down below. Apart from cookies, there are also a couple of other methods we can use to save and read certain information on your computer, tablet or smartphone. An example of this is local storage. This works more or less the same as a cookie. To make it a little easier, we will group together both concepts under ‘cookies’ in this explanation. To place cookies we use a few common techniques, like Javascript and tracking pixels.
Are cookies safe?
Using cookies is completely safe and very common if you use the internet a lot. A cookie never contains personal information like your name, phone number or email address. Because of this, cookies can never be used to approach you directly via email or telemarketing campaigns. It is very important to us that you know exactly what type of cookies we place and what these are used for by third parties. You can read all about this down below.
What do we use cookies for?
We use cookies for several different purposes:
- Functional cookies: to make sure our website is user-friendly and safe.
- Analytical cookies: to be able to analyse how our website is used.
- Advertising cookies: to be able to place the right advertisements.
- Social media cookies: to make sure you can share or save pictures and articles.
Below you can read exactly what the cookies in these categories do. You can also read about which companies can place cookies on your computer, tablet or phone when you visit our website, since we do not always do it ourselves. Sometimes we use the services of other companies and they place the cookies. The Google company is a good example of this. Google offers us products we can use to measure how many visitors we have on our website and supplies us with some advertisements. To be able to do this they have to place a cookie.
When another company places a cookie, we will refer you via a link to their privacy statement or cookie statement. That way you can read for yourself what these companies do with the cookies they place.
Functional cookies
Cookies that ensure an optimal and safe user experience on our website.
Since our website does not offer the possibility to create an account, the use of functional cookies is limited for you. Nevertheless, we do have to use them to make sure our website works properly.
This is what we use them for:
- To check your browser settings so we are able to show you our website on your screen in optimal form.
- To detect misuse of our website and because of that prevent cyber attacks among other things.
- To make sure the website is not using too many technical resources so it remains available. We use a service from Cloudflare for this.
- To determine your global location so we can make sure the website is loaded from the right server. We use a service from Cloudflare for this.
You do not need to give permission for the use of functional cookies and they also cannot be turned off by you.
Analytical cookies
Cookies that ensure we can optimize our website.
We want you to have a good time on our website. Since we cannot keep asking every visitor what is good or bad about our website, we are continually optimizing our website based on the statistics we collect.
These statistics can be about the following things:
- How long do you stay on our website?
- What do you click on during your visit?
- How many articles have you read?
- If we make a suggestion for another fun article, do you click on it?
- What device do you use for visiting our website?
- Via what source or advertisement did you find our website?
And more generally:
- How many people visit our website?
- Can we optimize our website for our users?
- In what order do users visit our articles?
- Can our users easily find the elements (like the navigation menu) on our website?
We collect these types of statistical data using Google Analytics. In order to do this, Google Analytics places analytical cookies for us.
Advertising cookies
Cookies that enable us to show you relevant advertisements
Maintaining our website and making sure new content goes up takes a lot of time and manpower. To be able to finance all of this we need some income. This income is generated from the advertisements that we show on the pages you visit. We want to make these advertisements (and possibly videos) as relevant to you as we can. In order to achieve this, our advertisement partners place cookies for us.
The advertising cookies make it possible to:
- To ensure you do not see the same advertisement too often.
- Show you advertisements that are relevant to your in particular.
- Show you targeted contextual advertisements (for example: an advertisement for a mascara brand to go along with an article on mascara).
- Keep track of which advertisements are viewed the most.
ATTENTION: If you do not give us permission to place advertising cookies, you will see advertisements on our website. However, they will not be personalized.
The following companies are able to place advertising cookies for us:
Social media cookies
Cookies that make sure you can share the things you like with your friends
When you see something you like on our website you might want to share it with your friends and family. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn enable this sharing by letting us place share buttons on our website. To make sure these share buttons work properly these social media platforms place a cookie so they can recognize you when you want. To share an article or photo.
These cookies make it possible that:
- You can directly share content from our website when you are logged into selected social media.
On our website, we offer the possibility for you to share our content on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. You can read about the specific content of the cookies placed by these social media partners and the possible data they collect through these on their own websites. We have supplied the links to their cookie statements below. Please be aware that these parties’ statements can change regularly.
Removing and/or turning off cookies
You might choose not to accept any cookies on our website and other websites. Unfortunately, we cannot turn off cookies for you; you have to do this yourself. Please do be aware that when you decide not to accept cookies, we cannot guarantee that our website will work properly for you.
We want to help you on your way with the following links:
- Removing cookies in Mozilla Firefox
- Blocking cookies in Mozilla Firefox
- Removing cookies in Google Chrome
- Blocking cookies in Google Chrome
- Removing cookies in Internet Explorer
- Blocking cookies in Internet Explorer
- Removing cookies in Safari
- Blocking cookies in Safari
Finally
We do our best, but unfortunately we cannot always control everything.
Despite the fact that we try to keep a full understanding of what type of cookies our website places, it might still happen that third parties place cookies that are not included in this statement. That is simply due to the way the internet and websites operate. This could happen, for example, when we use embedded content in our articles; these are texts, social media posts, pictures or videos that are saved by a third party, but are shown on or via our website.
We do our best to try to keep the list of cookies and companies that place them up-to-date on this page, but it could still happen that a cookie is placed by a company that is not included in this list. If you notice this happening, would you please inform us of this via our contact form? We would be eternally grateful and, of course, we would update the list as quickly as possible. If you are looking for information about the cookies placed by a third party, it would be best to directly contact the party in question.
This statement might be subject to change without our visitors being informed about it. This is why we recommend visiting this page regularly to find out if any changes have been made since your last visit.