Cookie notice

A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to keep, so that something can be remembered from one page to the next, or from one visit to the next.

This notice is about the public United Buyers Group website — the pages you are reading now. It does not cover uHub, the portal behind the Login button. uHub has its own cookies, and they are set out in the uHub privacy policy, the document members and supplier partners accept when they get an account.

One cookie of our own is set on these pages, and it is there to make the site work rather than to watch anybody:

• Display settings (app-settings). It remembers how the site is drawn for you — the colour theme, light or dark, the text size — and which language the portal shows you. The public pages take their language from the address instead, so a page under /fr/ is in French whatever this cookie says. It is given no expiry date, so it normally goes when you close your browser — a browser set to reopen your last session may keep it.
• If you are signed in to uHub, the cookies that keep you signed in travel with you on these pages too, and are kept alive while you read, because the button in the header then leads to your dashboard instead of to the sign-in screen. Those cookies belong to the portal, and the privacy policy linked above is where they are described.

UBG uses Google Analytics to see how the website is used: how many people arrive, which pages they read, which search or which site sent them. The two cookies below are stored under this website’s own name, not under Google’s, but it is Google’s code — loaded on these pages — that writes them and reads them back, and what they record is sent to Google. We do not use them to advertise to you, and we do not sell what they collect.

We do not ask you first. Measurement starts as soon as a public page loads — this one included — so by the time you read this, the two cookies are most likely already set. How long they last is Google’s own default, which Google gives as two years from your last visit; nothing on this website shortens that or extends it.

• _ga — a random number that lets Google Analytics tell one browser from another. It carries no name, no email address and no postal address.
• _ga_MLXNKY17L6 — the same thing for this website in particular, plus the state of the visit you are on, so that reading four pages counts as one visit rather than four. The letters and digits name our Google Analytics property; they say nothing about you.

This website has no cookie switch, and we would rather say so than show you a button that does nothing. Two things do work, and neither of them breaks a single page here:

• Your browser. Every browser can refuse cookies, or delete the ones it already holds, for every website or for this one alone — look under its privacy settings, for Cookies or Site data. Deleting ours removes everything named above. The display settings cookie is written again on your next visit; the Google Analytics ones are not, for as long as your browser keeps refusing them.
• Google’s own opt-out. Google publishes a browser add-on that turns Google Analytics off on every website you visit, not only this one.