What are cookies?
A cookie is a small text file that a website saves on your computer or mobile device when you visit the site.
In the Council, we use cookies for two main reasons:
- produce anonymous statistical reports on the website's audience
- optimise the content functionalities and technical performance of the website
It is important to mention that any and all information we collect through cookies is anonymised.
Moreover, this information is only stored for a limited amount of time depending on the cookie type, for a maximum of 13 months.
The cookies used by the Council for analytics purposes are set with your consent. Council retains full control of this data.
How do we use cookies?
The Council uses cookies from the web analytics tools Piano Analytics and Hotjar in order to collect aggregated, anonymous statistics on the user’s experience. More precisely, data about:
- metrics: visits, page views, time spent on page, new or returning visitors, video plays
- hardware and software information: devices, browsers and operating systems
- location: limited to continents, countries, regions, cities (GPS geolocation is not used)
- sources of traffic to the Council's website: external websites, search engines, email, social media
- downloads: pdf files attached to press releases and Council e-books
- IPs (as mentioned, all anonymised)
By default, the browsing experience of our website visitors is not tracked by Piano Analytics and Hotjar. You may, though, choose to consent to contributing your browsing experience on our website for us to produce aggregated statistics.
If you enable the Do Not Track option in your web browser, we will respect your choice and your browsing experience on our website will not be tracked for our aggregated statistics.
Additionally, you can refuse Piano Analytics and Hotjar tracking either by using the 'opt-out' option available at the bottom of this page or by clicking on "I accept only necessary cookies" when visiting the Cyprus presidency website for the first time. To make sure that you are not asked the same question twice, we also use a particular type of cookie which records your 'opt out/opt in' choice.
All analytics data communication is encrypted via HTTPS protocol.
Additionally, the Council uses the service CloudFlare to improve the loading time of its website - in order to provide you with content faster. CloudFlare also ensures better web security during your visit.
Third party cookies
Piano Analytics
- pcid: it assigns an ID to a visitor. It gets automatically deleted after 13 months
- pctx: it ensures coherence of the information collected by Piano analytics. It gets automatically deleted after 13 months
- pprv: it registers the consent to the use of cookies. It gets automatically deleted after 13 months
Hotjar
- hjSession: defines a session and ensures that requests are attributed to the same session. It expires after 30 minutes
- hjSessionUser: set when a user first land on a page, ensures that data from subsequent visits to the same site are attributed to the same user ID. It expires after 12 months
Cloudflare
- cf_bm: it identifies and mitigates automated traffic to protect the website from bad bots. Cloudflare does not track users from site to site or from session to session. The cf_bm cookie does not correspond to any user ID or other identifiers and expires after 30 minutes of continuous inactivity by the user
- cf_clearance: it stores the proof of challenge passed. It is used to no longer issue a challenge if present
First party cookies
- consilium.language: keeps track of the language chosen by the user. It expires after 12 months
Data retention
The data collected via Piano Analytics are retained for a maximum period of 25 months and are stored on servers located in Bordeaux, France.
How to control cookies
You can control and/or delete cookies as you wish. You can delete all cookies that are already on your computer and you can set most browsers to prevent them from being placed.
Managing cookies in your browser
Most browsers allow you to:
- see what cookies you have and delete them on an individual basis
- block third party cookies
- block cookies from particular sites
- block all cookies from being set
- delete all cookies when you close your browser
If you chose to delete cookies, you should be aware that any preferences will be lost.
Also, if you block cookies completely, many websites (including ours) will not work properly and webcasts will not work at all. For these reasons, we do not recommend turning cookies off when using our webcasting services.
Piano Analytics and Hotjar opt-out option
Your current status is OPT-INOPT-OUT
I understand that by enabling the OPT-OUT option, I will be counted as a user who does not wish to be tracked, and my browsing data on this website will be excluded from the data reported by Piano Analytics and Hotjar.
I understand that by enabling the OPT-IN option, I will receive some new Piano Analytics and Hotjar cookies enabling the collection of audience data on this website.