Cookies on clients' sites using our survey code
Our survey code is a small piece of logic (Javascript) that we provide to our clients in order that invitations to surveys can appear on their site. These surveys are used to gather feedback and opinions from site visitors so our clients can provide a better service.
There is no actual web site to visit for our survey code, you will encounter it only when visiting the web site of one of our clients. If you are invited to participate in a survey and choose to do so, then our survey will open (usually in a new window).
One or more of the following cookies are set by our survey code:
ecos / eds
Our survey code sets this cookie, which is a permanent and has a very long expiry time (years in the future). When the cookie is set is determined by how our clients choose to install our survey code, and any consent mechanisms they have implemented.
The standard deployment form is that no cookie is set unless you are invited to participate in a survey and either choose to participate in it, or tick a checkbox allowing us to set a cookie so as not to re-invite you again.
If cookie consent is managed by the client's web site, and you have already given consent for a cookie to be set, then the cookie may be set at the same time as the invitation to participate in a survey is shown.
The cookie is called 'ecos', or 'eds' and stores no identifiable information, nor any kind of ID which could be used to identify you later. It stores only pairs of survey IDs and dates; the date+time which you were last invited to participate in each survey. For example the cookie might contain "12345-1300123456,345678-1312123456", which means you were last invited to the survey "12345" on date+time 1300123456 (this is a technical notation for Mar 14th 2011 5:24pm GMT), and you were last invited to survey 345678 on date+time 1312123456 (Jul 31st 2011 3:44pm BST).
It may also store an Installation ID (e.g. INS-123456789), which is our ID for client web site or project you are visiting. Because this is only stored in a first-party cookie against that site, it cannot be used to see what other sites you may have visited and hence cannot be used for any profiling. This value exists only for when a client may have multiple installations of our survey technology on their site.
ecos.dt
Our survey code sets and updates this cookie once every half-second to a value which represents the current date/time.
It tracks the latest point in time a respondent has one of our clients' websites open, and is used to accurately trigger exit surveys.
This cookie is a "session" cookie, which means it will be deleted when the browsing session is finished.
en-persist
This cookie is created by our site infrastructure in order to ensure web traffic is evenly distributed between our servers. This cookie contains no tracking information and is not used by our research or other software in any way other than to ensure your traffic is correctly distributed. The cookie is deleted at the end of the session.
__cfduid
The "__cfduid" cookie is set by the CloudFlare service to identify trusted web traffic. It does not correspond to any particular user id in and does not store any personally identifiable information. More info on CloudFlare can be found on their site.