Cookies are small text files that are stored in your browser when you visit our website. These files contain information about your browsing and interaction with our website, with the purpose of making your user experience more efficient and being able to show you advertising based on your browsing habits. Some cookies are essential for the proper functioning of our website, such as technical or user interface personalization cookies, and others, such as analysis or behavioral advertising (or marketing) cookies, require that we inform you and that you give us your consent before we can use them.

LocalStorage and SessionStorage are two data storage spaces located in your device’s browser and, like cookies, they can be our own (when created by our own website) or third-party (when created by our service providers or partners). The difference between the two spaces is that LocalStorage stores information indefinitely or until you decide to clear the browser data, while SessionStorage stores information for as long as the tab where our website is being used remains open and, once closed, the information is deleted. The difference with cookies is that these two spaces allow more information to be stored than cookies without impacting the performance of our website.

You can obtain more information here.

In general, the risk level of cookies depends on their type, and whether they are our own or third-party. Most cookies are not dangerous. Specifically:

Technical and preference cookies have more benefits than risks

The Article 29 Working Party (formerly WP29 and currently the European Data Protection Board) in its Opinion 4/2012, “on cookie consent exemption“, considers that they do not pose a risk to you and exempts all cookies that meet the following criteria from the obligation to obtain prior consent for their use:

• those necessary for communications to be transmitted over a network between the user and the servers hosting the website, and all those
• necessary to provide a specific functionality explicitly requested by the user.

This exemption from the obligation to base the lawfulness of their use on your consent, as they do not represent a risk to you, is likewise reflected in the cookie guides published by most Data Protection Agencies in EU countries (for example, in the Spanish case, it is included in section 4.1 of the guide on the use of cookies, from July 2020).

The WP29 even defined the purposes that it explicitly considers to present more benefits than risks for you.

Cookie purposes explicitly excluded from informed consent

Regarding their purpose, the WP29 explicitly excludes the following cookies from the obligation to obtain the visitor’s informed consent:

• Cookies called “user input”, which are usually used to track user actions when filling out online forms in an HTTP session, or to remember the shopping cart that the user has selected in an e-commerce site,
• Session cookies used for user authentication or identification, which store a type of token (proof that the user is who they say they are and has already been authenticated) to prevent the user from having to provide their username or password on every page they request that has restricted access control,
• User security cookies, introduced specifically to strengthen the security of the service explicitly requested by the user. For example, to detect erroneous and repeated connection attempts to a website, or abuses,
• Multimedia player session cookies,
• Session cookies to balance the load of information systems,
• User interface personalization cookies, such as, for example, to remember your preferred language, and
• Certain plug-in cookies for exchanging social content.

In general, in those cases where a website offers its visitors a service, for using cookies exclusively for the purposes for which it is not necessary to obtain consent, listed above, whether they are own or third-party, it will not be necessary for the person responsible for the website, us, to inform the visitor of their use or to obtain their consent.

Statistical cookies ALSO do not pose an appreciable risk

Regarding the processing of data collected through analysis cookies, the aforementioned opinion of the current European Data Protection Board stated that, although they are not exempt from the duty to obtain consent for their use, it is unlikely that they represent a risk to the privacy of users as long as they are first-party cookies, that they process aggregated data for a strictly statistical purpose, that information is provided about their uses and the possibility for users to express their refusal regarding their use is included.

First-party cookies also do not usually involve an appreciable risk for you

First-party cookies are generated by our website, while third-party cookies are generated by services or providers independent of us, and it is these independent providers who define the purposes and means of the processing they carry out.

Our only responsibility regarding third-party cookies is the necessary collaboration of our website in placing these cookies on your computer, a placement to which we will normally be obliged as it is necessary to be able to use the services provided to us by said third parties (for example, to check that you are not one of those robots that abound on the Internet, and thus prevent the requests or comments that could be sent to us through the forms on our website from harming the attention given to real ones).

Strictly necessary cookies allow basic website functionality, such as user login and account management. The website cannot be used correctly without strictly necessary cookies.

Analytical cookies are used to see how visitors use the website, for example: analysis cookies. These cookies cannot be used to directly identify a specific visitor.

Marketing or behavioral advertising cookies store information on user behavior obtained through continuous observation of your browsing habits, which allows for the development of a specific profile to show relevant and attractive advertisements for the individual user, and therefore, more valuable for third-party advertisers. We will use marketing cookies exclusively if you authorize us to do so by pressing the corresponding button on the cookie banner or through its settings menu.

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We inform you that although the purpose of the third-party cookies we use, for which we are responsible, is indicated in the table above, these third parties may dedicate the data collected by their cookies to other purposes for which they are solely responsible. In the case of third-party cookies, our responsibility for the purposes of the third parties is limited to the downloading of the cookies onto your device (which we do for the purpose indicated above). You can find out about the purposes of these third parties, and whether or not they make transfers to third countries, in their corresponding policies (see the links in the table).

For example, we use cookies from the Google Analytics service, from Google Ireland Ltd, to extract aggregated statistics. This means that the cookies can also send the information they collect to Google Ireland Ltd. To avoid this, we recommend installing in your browser the add-on designed by Google itself to not send it the data collected by these cookies. This add-on does not prevent your browser from sending the data to our website, but it does prevent it from being sent to Google.

You can obtain more information about how Google uses your data by consulting the following pages of this provider:

• Google Privacy Terms
• Safeguarding your data

You can administer, manage, and deactivate the cookies used by our website at any time from your browser, for example, to withdraw your consent, by following the instructions provided by your browser manufacturer:

• Instructions for Microsoft Edge
• Instructions for Google Chrome
• Instructions for Google Android
• Instructions for Internet Explorer 11
• Instructions for Mozilla Firefox
• Instructions for Opera
• Instructions for Safari

If you deactivate the installation of cookies in your browser, you will be able to continue accessing our website with the same browser, but browsing may not be optimal and some of the services offered may not function correctly.

We will update this cookie policy whenever necessary to reflect changes in our products and services.

If there are substantial changes to this policy, we will notify you before they take effect by posting a prominent notice on the cookie banner. In any case, we recommend that you periodically review this cookie policy to know which cookies we use and how we use them.