What is a Cookie and how is it used
WHAT IS A COOKIE?
Most websites you visit use cookies in order to improve your user experience by enabling that website to ‘remember’ you, either just for the duration of your visit (using a ‘session cookie’) or for repeat visits (using a ‘persistent cookie’).
Cookies do lots of different things, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, storing your preferences, and generally improving your experience of a website. Cookies make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier. If a website doesn’t use cookies, it will think you are a new visitor every time you move to a new page on the site – for example, when you enter your login details and move to another page it won’t recognize you and it won’t be able to keep you logged in.
Some websites will also use cookies to enable them to target their advertising or marketing messages based for example, on your location and/or browsing habits.
Cookies may be set by the website you are visiting (‘first party cookies’) or they may be set by other websites who run content on the page you are viewing (‘third party cookies’).
Note: The 'first party' Align cookies (see below) do not retain any personal information (name, address, IP address, etc.) which the user may have entered on the Align website. However, we do use a robust combination of data sources (online, orders, customers, etc.) to get a full picture of our product and marketing efforts. This is only for our efforts and we do not share your information to other businesses for their own purposes.
STRICTLY NECESSARY COOKIES
Some cookies are strictly necessary in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features. Without these cookies, we will not be able to determine the number of unique users of the site or provide certain features, such as automatic sign in to Align services.
Examples of strictly necessary cookies set by Align:
| Cookie name | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Invisalign | "cookiesDirective"; - this is the cookie which keeps the personalized settings for cookies on the Align site. You can edit these settings on the "Manage Cookies" page. |
FUNCTIONALITY COOKIES
Functionality cookies record information about choices you’ve made and allow us to tailor the website to you. For example, on the "Find a practitioner" page we use a cookie to remember your browser's language settings so that we have your country pre-selected in the country picker.
Examples of functionality cookies set by Align:
| Cookie name | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Invisalign | "acceptLanguage" - contains the language preferences of the current user which are used on the "Find a practitioner" page. |
PERFORMANCE COOKIES
We use Performance cookies across the Align website for internal purposes to help us to provide you with a better user experience. Information supplied by cookies helps us to understand how our visitors use the Align website so that we can improve how we present our content to you. They also allow us to test different design ideas for particular pages, such as the Align Homepage. We generally contract with independent measurement and research companies to perform these services for us and when this is the case, these cookies may be set by a third party company (third party cookies). Third party cookies are identified in the list below, together with information as to how you can opt out of receiving them.
Examples of performance cookies set by Align:
| Cookie name | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Invisalign | "vid" - session cookie used on the "Find a practitioner" page for tracking the search request made by the user. |
| Google Analytics | The Align website uses Google Analytics. This is a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. Google Analytics sets a cookie in order to evaluate use of those services and compile a report for us. |
| Google DoubleClick | The Invisalign website sometimes uses Google DoubleClick to measure the effectiveness of its online marketing campaigns.
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THIRD PARTY COOKIES
To support our efforts, we sometimes embed photos, video and other content from social media websites such as YouTube, Facebook, Google and Twitter. Pages with this embedded content may present cookies from these websites. Similarly, when you use one of the “like” or “follow” buttons on our websites, a cookie may be set by the service you have chosen to share content through. You may also choose to use tools from other social media that Align cannot control, such as Pinterest. Align does not control the use of any third party cookies and our tool will not block cookies from those websites. You should check the relevant third party website for more information about these.
ONLINE BEHAVIORAL ADVERTISIING
Our websites may occasionally have advertising. A certain amount of this advertising is tailored to the individual user. We use cookies to determine what advertising might be most relevant to you based on the areas you look at on our sites and your IP address geo-location. The table below provides links to the individual ad serving partners’ opt-out mechanisms but you can also manage these through the cookie settings page.
Examples of online behavioral advertising cookies set by Align:
| Cookie name | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Ad Serving (non-targeted) | The advertisements seen by international users of the site are served by a number of third party ad serving providers (full list provided below). The cookies accompanying the ads allow them and their advertisers to monitor the effectiveness of the ads (e.g. by using statistical analysis cookies) and make the ads more relevant to you (e.g. if you use our sites from outside of the UK, you may get ads from your local country). You can choose whether or not to allow these cookies to be set in cookie settings. If you would like to opt-out of an individual organization’s cookies, please use the links below.
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