Cookie Policy - South African Wines

Latest revision: 5th July, 2019

What is a Cookie Policy

This page explains why, and under which conditions, web browsers retain information about users visiting https://www.proteawines.jp.

It explains the benefits of this functionality, implemented through cookies, and also describes if and who such information might be shared with, and how it can be erased from the browser and what the consequences are.

What are Cookies?

Cookies are small files stored on the user’s computer when they visit a website that uses cookies, and assuming that the user has activates the functionality for the use of cookies in their web browser.

These files are used by the website to recognize repeat users, and enable various functionality of the website for the convenience of the user.

They are designed to hold a modest amount of data specific to a particular client and website, and can be accessed either by the web server or the client computer. Thus, the server to deliver customized content to user, or the content may contain scripts which interact with the cookie.

Cookies can also be used to track user’s actions, and may enable targeted profiling for advertising purposes, which most users see as an invasion of privacy.

What Data do Cookies contain?

The data stored in cookies pertains to a particular user and a particular website. The format is a lookup table with pairs of key and data values.

Cookies only store data which the user has entered voluntarily, or which the web server already possesses.

Do we use Cookies on our Web Site?

Yes. Cookies are used to improve the quality of the experience users have when browsing our web site, and to provide services and features for users. The use of cookies can be limited and disabled through the user’s web browser (see below). In such cases though, some of the web site functionality may be unavailable.

What types of Cookies are used on our Web Site?

The standard website, excluding the E-Commerce pages, generates two types of cookies: session cookies and comments cookies.

Session cookies are set when a user logs in to the site. They contain authentication details, and expire every 15 days.

When a user leaves a comment on our web site, a cookie is set containing user’s name, email address, and URL. This cookie allows the web sit to automatically fill in user name, email, and URL fields on subsequent visits. Comment cookies expires in 347.222 days or 30,000,000 seconds.

When you fill out a contact form that has a Google reCaptcha to ensure that you are a real person, the reCaptcha allows Google to set a cookie in your browser and capture information from the browser to help determine if you are a human or not. This information includes:

A complete snapshot of the user’s browser window at that moment in time, pixel by pixel
Browser plugins
All cookies placed by Google over the last 6 months
Number of mouse clicks/touches you’ve made on that screen
CSS information for that page
Javascript objects
The date
The browser language

We publish our email address so that users have an alternative method to contact us if they do not wish to use the contact forms.

For our E-Commerce site, visitors must accept a session cookie. This session cookie contains simply the session ID number which identifies the visitor to the store, as separate from other visitors. The session cookie contains no personal identity information, and in itself is thus anonymous as a third-party cannot use anything in the cookie to identify the visitor in any way. This session cookie expires at the end of the visitor’s session in the browser, or at a predefined time (typically 24 minutes) after their last “click”, whichever is sooner.

Please see also the separate Privacy Notice on our E-Commerce site for further information about the cookies used there.

Tracking Cookies

Websites may include embedded advertising material served from a third-party site, and the adverts may then store a cookie for that third-party site, containing information fed to it from the hosting site. This information might include the user’s browsing history, from which targeted advertisements could then be pushed to the user when that user visits a related website. Such ‘tracking cookies’ are often seen as an invasion of privacy since they allow an advertiser to build up profiles of users without their consent or knowledge.

Protea Wines Japan does not use advertising, or any third-party cookies.

When are Cookies created?

Cookies are usually written to the user’s computer when a webpage is newly loaded, and some action is taken by the web server based on what the user has entered on the page.

Why are Cookies used?

Cookies are used as one means of maintaining information between sessions on a website, or between sessions on related websites, a kind of short-hand which bypasses the need for a server to store this information itself. It should be noted that if information were stored on a server without the use of cookies, retrieval of information about a user would require an actual login on each visit to a site.

Cookies are intended to store small amounts of data. If there is an actual requirement for a large amount of information to store, then the cookie is used as a pointer to identify a user, with the rest of the information looked up on a server-side database.

How long does a Cookie last?

Cookie expiry date can be set on creation. Many cookies are session cookies, which are deleted when the session finishes, e.g., when the user closes the browser, or logs out of a web site. However, cookies can be made to persist an arbitrarily long time after that.

Who can access Cookies?

On creation, the root domain of a cookie can be set, and any URL belonging to that root will be able to access the cookie. Note that one cannot set the root domain to top-level domains, such as “.net” or country domains such as “.co.jp”.

By default cookies are visible to all paths in their domains, but at the time of creation they can be restricted to a given sub-path, e.g., “www.somesite.domain/pdf”.

It is not possible for a web page to view cookies set by other web sites.

Are Cookies secure?

Cookies are not an intrusion of privacy per se, since as noted above they can only contain data which the user has given voluntarily, or which the web server already has. Certainly the the data could be made available to third party websites, but this would be the case also if the same data were stored centrally on the web server itself. If a user has concerns that the data given to a web server will not be treated as confidential, then the use should evaluate whether they need to give that data at all.

How to view and delete Cookies

Cookies stored by the user’s web browser can be deleted by the user at any time. Each major browser provides a method under privacy or security options to view each cookie, and delete cookies either individually or all at once. If you need assistance, an internet search for “how to view cookies in (insert your browser name)” will bring up relevant search results.

Managing Cookies

Viewing and deleting cookies is one aspect of managing cookies. Users can also set up policies for cookies in their browser. Each browser provides a different way of doing this, usually under advanced settings in privacy or security options. In the policy settings, users can for example disable third-party cookies entirely, manage exceptions, etc.