Cookies Policy

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.

On the website of the European Defence Agency (EDA), we use cookies for two main reasons:

to make the website work efficiently
to gather information that helps us shape our content to suit your interests

It is important to mention that any and all information we collect through cookies is anonymised (see below).

Moreover, this information is only stored for a limited amount of time: between 1 hour and 24 months, depending on the cookie type (see below).

The cookies used by EDA for analytics purposes are set only with your consent. EDA retains full control of this data.

How do we use cookies?

EDA’s website mostly uses “first-party cookies”. These are cookies set and controlled by the EDA, not by any external organisation.

However, to ensure the best viewing experience of some of our pages, you will have to accept cookies from external organisations.

The 3 types of first-party cookies we use are to:

store visitor preferences
make our websites operational
gather analytics data (about user behaviour)

Visitor preferences

These are set by EDA and only EDA can read them. They retain:

if you have agreed to (or refused) this site’s cookie policy
if you have already replied to a survey pop-up for example or your recent search words

Cookie

Description

Duration

_gat_UA-37108915-1

1 min

Operational cookies

There are some cookies that we have to include in order for certain web pages to function.

Cookie	Description	Duration
ASP.NET_SessionId	This cookie is used in sites developed with Microsoft.Net. When a user start browsing a unique session ID is created, which keeps track of all the information regarding that session. This information is stored in the web server and it is identified via a GUID. The GUID is essential for any ASP.NET site to function properly.	Session

Analytics cookies

The European Defence Agency uses cookies from the web analytics tool Google Analytics 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 EDA’s website: external websites, search engines, email, social media
IPs (as mentioned, all anonymised)

Cookie

Description

Duration

_ga

This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to calculate visitor, session, campaign data and keep track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookies store information anonymously and assign a randomly generated number to identify unique visitors.

1 year 11 months 28 days 23 hours 59 minutes

_gid

This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to store information of how visitors use a website and helps in creating an analytics report of how the website is doing. The data collected including the number visitors, the source where they have come from, and the pages visited in an anonymous form.

23 hours 59 minutes

You may refuse Google Analytics tracking either by using the 'opt-out' option available at the bottom of this page or by clicking on "I refuse cookies" when visiting the EDA's website for the first time.

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.

All about cookies