How FashionBeans.com Uses Cookies

How FashionBeans.com Uses Cookies

Our Mission

FashionBeans.com is a men’s fashion and style guide that provides you with the very latest in depth feature articles, street style photography, grooming tips, industry news, style advice and voucher codes on a daily basis for FREE. Our team believe in free press, so we will never charge you for accessing our content – now or in the future.

With this in mind, we would like to make you aware of what a cookie is, how we utilise cookies on our site(s) and how you can change your personal cookie settings. The information below refers to all domains and sub-domains (such as the FashionBeans Shop) on the FashionBeans.com website.

To find the information you need quickly and easily, please use the menu below:

What Are Cookies?

A cookie is a small text file containing information, which is placed on your hard drive when you visit a site. It is generated by the website’s server, and the information the cookie contains can be used by that same server whenever the user re-visits the site. A cookie is almost like your identification card, telling a website when the same user has returned.

What Is The Reason For Cookies?

Cookies generally make websites faster and easier for individual users. They can be used to tailor the website’s content to your preferences/needs, speed up the use of the site or, alternatively, are necessary for it to function correctly (for example: Remembering to keep you logged into the site whilst you browse or for remembering the products in your shopping cart when you change pages).

Companies normally use cookies because they save both the website and the user time – making the overall visiting and browsing experience more efficient and enjoyable.

Websites can also use cookies to track visitors and how they interact with the site (which pages they click and how long they visit, for example), allowing the website to then analyse the anonymous data and tailor the content/layout to their audience. Hopefully you can see by now that they help make websites, like ours, better.

Are Cookies Dangerous?

NO. Cookies are just small pieces of text. They are not computer programs or viruses, so they cannot be ran as code or used to spread viruses.

Can Cookies Compromise User Privacy?

As previously mentioned, cookies are small text files that are stored on the individual user’s hard drive. Because they cannot run code or do anything malicious, a cookie cannot read other information saved on the hard drive, or get a user’s e-mail address etc. They only contain and transfer to the server as much information as the users themselves have disclosed to a certain web site.

If you would like to read more about cookies then please visit: www.aboutcookies.org

FashionBeans Cookies

FashionBeans.com sets a few cookies throughout its website in order to help us to understand our audience better and make the site as efficient and quick as possible. Here are the ways which we utilise these cookies:

Commenting

When you leave a comment on the site, you enter your name and email by default, as well as your personal view on the article. When you do this we save 3 pieces of information within a cookie on your hard drive, so that the next time you come back to the site, on the same computer, your information will already be filled in for you. It makes commenting on future articles quicker and easier for you, whilst ensuring your future comments do not go through our new user moderation process.

Remember that no-one else can access this cookie on your computer but our web server, and we take your privacy very seriously. We will never sell personal information to 3rd parties, and you have our word on that:

Cookie Name Purpose
subscribe_checkbox This stores whether you have chosen to subscribe to follow up comments on any particular article (set by the check box underneath the comments form). It will also tell you whether you have subscribed to a particular article’s comments when you next view the article.
comment_author Used to store the name you entered when you submitted a comment on one of our articles. It allows the comment form to be populated with your name in advance the next time you come back to the site. This cookie expires in just under a year.
comment_author_email Used to store the email address you entered when you submitted a comment on one of our articles. It allows the comment form to be populated with your email the next time you come back to the site. In conjunction with the comment_author cookie, this will also notify our system about whether your new comments need moderating or not (all new users have to have their first comment moderated). This cookie expires in just under a year.
fbeans_cookies Used to store whether you have seen or dismissed our cookie notice. You know, a cookie about whether you have been notified about cookies. If this cookie is present, you will not see the annoying cookie notice at the bottom of your screen. This cookie expires in 365 days.
FashionBeans Forum Cookies

If you browse the FashionBeans forums, a couple of cookies will be set in order to maintain functionality (such as showing new posts that have been made since your last visit and which threads you have already read). These are showcased below:

Cookie Name Purpose
bb_lastvisit This is the time of your last visit to the forum. We use this cookie so that we can show you relevant information and activity that has happened since your last visit to the forum.
bb_lastactivity This cookie details the time of your personal last activity on the forum so we can update the forum stats to show how many users/guests are currently online, as well as using it to set when a post has been marked as read or unread.
Third Party Cookies
Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a service that allows us to anonymously track the use of our website by those who visit it. All the data is aggregated and anonymised meaning you cannot be identified personally. This data is imperative to us, as it helps us identify content you would like to see more of, which sections of the site are most popular (so we can develop their features or increase their schedule), as well as helping us tweak the site so it is more inline with your needs.

The following cookies are set on the FashionBeans.com site using JavaScript served from Google. To read more on Google’s own privacy and cookie policy, please visit the following address:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html

Cookie Name Purpose
_ga Used to distinguish users. Stores a unique client identifier (Client ID), which is a randomly generated number. Once the ID is generated it’s stored in the cookie and is included with each hit / request sent to Google Analytics. This ID is later used by Google Analytics servers to calculate user, session, and campaign data. Expires after 2 years.
_gat Used to throttle request rate. Expires after 10 minutes.
Third Party Media Sites

To support our articles and content, sometimes we embed photos or video content from websites such as YouTube and Flickr. As a result, when you visit a page with content embedded from sites such as these you may be presented with cookies from these websites (although we always strive to embed non-cookie versions). FashionBeans.com does not control the dissemination of these cookies. You should check the relevant third party website for more information about these.

Social Sharing Tools

FashionBeans.com provides social sharing buttons and features on many of its web pages – such as (but not limited to) Google ‘+1’, FaceBook ‘Like’ or Twitter ‘Tweet’. These have been incorporated into the site design to enable users of the site to easily share articles with their friends through their favourite social networks, or to join the Official FashionBeans social networks quickly and easily.

These sites may set a cookie when you are also logged in to their service. FashionBeans.com does not control the dissemination of these cookies and you should check the relevant third party website for more information about these.

Advertising Cookies

As we are dedicated to remaining a completely free resource, we have to try and make money in order to keep the FashionBeans.com website operational – we do this via forms of advertising on site. This could take the form of banner ads, Google Adsense or affiliate marketing links. Cookies play a part in tracking all these forms of advertising, and are essential in helping keep us operational and our content at the same high standard you have come to expect over the years.

Here are the companies we utilise as and when required – some are not always present – in order to serve our advertising:

Cookie Setter Purpose
Google Adsense The Google Adsense network is run by Google and helps show targeted ads to our readers based on their Google preferences and browsing. These can take the form of banner ads (such as on the forum) or as a simple collection of text links (such as at the top and bottom of our articles). For every click you make on one of these ads, we are paid a small amount by Google.

You can see Google’s full privacy policy for their advertising networks here: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/policies/privacy/ads/
Adzerk We utilise Adzerk software to serve relevant banner ads to specific users. This might be because a company only wants to target UK users or simply run their ads only on mobile devices.

You can see Adzerk’s full privacy policy for their advertising networks here: http://www.adzerk.com/privacy/ad-server/
Affiliate Networks FashionBeans.com is the member of many affiliate networks that provide us with custom tracking links to enable us to earn money if we send visitors to the retailers they work with – who then go on to complete a sale. For example, if you click one of the Topman products we recommend in our articles and then go on to buy something from the Topman website, FashionBeans will receive a small commission for the total value of the sale (usually around 5-10%).

The way this is tracked is via cookies. When you click one of our affiliate links (such as recommended products in articles, more info buttons on our shop pages or get discount code buttons) the individual affiliate network will drop a cookie on your computer that they can then track if you reach the final confirmation page on the retailer’s checkout. This allows us to recoup some of the money for spending the time researching and picking relevant products for each and every article we produce.

It’s important to note that not everyone pays us a commission, but we’re happy to showcase/recommend their products or list their discount codes/offers to ensure we’re always bringing you the best possible recommendations from the whole of the market.
How To Control & Delete Cookies

FashionBeans.com will not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information about you. However, if you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by the FashionBeans website, or indeed any other website, you can do this through your browser settings. The Help function within your browser should tell you how.

Alternatively, you may wish to visit http://www.aboutcookies.org, which contains comprehensive information on how to do this on a wide variety of browsers. You will also find details on how to delete cookies from your computer. For information on how to do this on the browser of your mobile phone you will need to refer to your handset manual.

Please be aware that restricting cookies can impact on the functionality of the FashionBeans website, as well as jeopardising our earning potential and therefore the ability for us to provide you with the high quality free content you have grown accustomed to on a daily basis.

Request Information

If you would like to know more about FashionBeans.com, our business, cookies, or any of the issues discussed here, feel free to get in touch whenever you like via our contact form.