Cookie Policy and Notice
Last Updated: July 17, 2019
Related Link: Privacy Policy
Policy vs Notice
To us, “Cookie Policy” is the framework that defines and guides all our activity involving cookies. “Notice” is that part of the framework that publishes specific calls to action, based on our current implementation, current web hosting service, etc. Our website is simple and robust, and so is our policy.
About Cookies in General
Cookies are small text files placed by websites on their users’ computers. These are not executable and so cannot serve as malware, worms, or viruses. Cookies come in many flavours:
(1) Usually, cookies are designed to do nice usability enhancements like: allowing the website to recognise its users on subsequent visits, helping users retain shopping carts when they come back later, render appropriately for mobile devices as opposed to PCs, help time out certain sessions for security, remember the default language to use, etc. These cookies are normally set by the company that serves you the website. These are “first party” cookies.
(2) Sometimes, websites might allow cookies of domains other than the one the user is currently browsing. Browsers usually detect and block such cookies.
(3) There is a type of third-party cookies that help display online ads that are relevant to the users’ interest. Some of these cookies collect data anonymously and some don’t. The anonymous help detect browsing patterns and approximate geographical location to improve user experience or serve targeted ads. For instance, let’s assume that you searched for a “toaster” on your favourite webshop and then moved on to your favourite news site. If the webshop and the news site use the same ad service and/or analytics service, you may see a banner ad with a toaster on the news site. Cookies are designed to be set, read, and managed by the same domain. But as ad cookies work by an ad service’s widget being used by multiple domains, these cookies can be read by all domains that share the same ad service.
(4) Some websites use images called ‘web beacons’ or ‘clear gifs’, which collect limited information such as a cookie number, a timestamp, and a record of the page on which they are placed. These beacons do not carry any personally identifiable information and are normally used to track the effectiveness of a given ad campaign, by counting the number of unique visitors. Third party web beacons may also be hosted by websites.
From the preceding discussion, it is clear that information collected by cookies and web beacons is not personally identifiable in almost all cases. But being followed by ads and campaigns as in 3 and 4 above are off-putting to some users. Hence, cookie management is a topic of importance.
Any of the above types of cookies may be session cookies or persistent cookies. Session cookies are those that determine (for instance) whether you are browsing from a mobile device or not (to render pages for that screen size), or to set your current language of browsing, etc. Also included are authentication cookies, and other security or configuration-related cookies. These cookies will be automatically destroyed when you close the browser. Persistent cookies stay on to help you pick up where you left off during your last visit. Additionally, type (1) above are also called “strictly necessary cookies”, without which the site will not function properly.
Our Policy
First Party
(5) Viswambara Software Systems does not set any cookies of its own on your computer. We utilize the products and services of Microsoft, Google, and WordPress (with ThemeFusion’s Avada) to bring you this website, the cookies for which are clearly enumerated in the Notice section of this document.
(6) We do not carry any advertisement widgets or web beacons to serve, target, or track ads or campaigns.
(7) We keep Web Logs switched off at Microsoft Azure App Services and hence do not persist your IP address in server logs or in any other form.
(8) We turn ON by default, all cookies that do not carry any personally identifiable information. We turn OFF by default any cookie that is non-essential for the functioning of this website but carries personally identifiable information. The full list of cookies is available in the Notice section.
Web Host and Third Party
(9) There are no third-party cookies on this website. The services described in (5) above are used as an intrinsic part of the website and are hence set as First Party cookies only.
Social Media Cookies

Links to our social media pages and our contact email address

Links for sharing articles via social media sites and apps
(10) These social media icons atop and at the bottom of our website and below our articles merely provide links to our pages on those websites.
(11) There are no cookies or integrations to social media sites as on the date of publishing this policy, nor is any planned for the near future.
Notice
List of Cookies
Cookie | Publisher | Cookie Type |
Personal Information |
Description | Expiry |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
ARRAfinity | Microsoft Azure |
Strictly necessary |
None | A 64-character server identifier, to indicate which web server instance to send page requests to, as the website may be served by more than one server to load-balance traffic. | When the browsing session ends |
_ga | Google Analytics |
Functional, used by analytics |
None | Google Analytics version number.
See Google Analytics Note below. |
2 years |
_gid | Google Analytics |
Analytics | None | GA version number and randomized ID called “Client ID” to indicate a unique visitor to the site. We do not collect or send “User ID”, which is personally identifiable information.
See Google Analytics Note below. |
24 hours |
_gat_gtag | Google Analytics |
Functional, used by analytics |
None | Used to throttle too many requests from being issued within a short time.
See Google Analytics Note below. |
1 minute |
privacy_embeds | WordPress/ Avada |
Strictly necessary |
None | Holds consent value, when Google Maps or YouTube embedding is enabled. | 12 months |
Google Analytics Note
Google Analytics tracking – anonymous data to track website usage like most-used pages and number of unique visitors per day. A randomly-generated string called “Client ID” is used to know that a given browser session is a unique user session.
Hungary
1054 Budapest,
Honvéd utca 8 1/2
India
32B Kasturi Avenue,
MRC Nagar, Chennai 600028
+91 44 42035733
UK
71-75 Shelton Street,
Covent Garden,
London WC2H 9JQ
+44 20 80899517
USA
Bellevue WA
Bloomington MN
+1 612 6664496