Hong Kong Tourism Board

INFORMATION ABOUT OUR USE OF COOKIES

Hong Kong Tourism Board, with a place of business at 9-11 Floor, Citicorp Centre, 18 Whitfield Road, North Point, Hong Kong ("we", "us" and "our") operate the website www.discoverhongkong.com ("Website") and other applications and APIs (collectively the "Services").

Our Services uses cookies and other tools to help distinguish you from other users of the Services. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you use the Services and also allows us to improve the Services.

WHAT ARE COOKIES?

Cookies are small text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded and may be stored on any of your internet enabled devices e.g. your computer, smartphone or tablet - like a memory for a web page. 

This means we automatically collect and store the following information about your visit:

•  the internet domain and IP address from where you access the Service;
•  the type of browser software and operating system used to access the Services and type of device;
•  the date and time you access the Services;
• if you linked to the Services from another website, the address of that website; and
• the pages or links you enter, visit and exit the Services from.

We also use other technologies such as web beacons, tracking URLs or SDKs (software development kits). Web beacons are small graphic files that contain a unique identifier that allows us to check whether you have accessed certain content, tracking URLs help us understand where the traffic to our Services comes from, and SDKs are set of programs and tools that allows for the creation of applications, and work similar to cookies and web beacons. For the purposes of this Cookie Policy, all such technologies will be considered 'Cookies'. 

Our Privacy Policy sets out full details of the other information we collect and how we use your personal information.

Please click here to view a list of cookies we use.

USE OF COOKIES

We use the following cookies:

• Strictly necessary cookies.  These are cookies that are required for the operation of the Services, and include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of the Services.  They include features, for example, Social Media plug-in; 
  
  
• Analytical/performance cookies.  These cookies allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around and use our Services. This helps us to improve the way our Services work, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily. These cookies are also used to help us understand what interests our users, and measure how effective our advertising is;
  
  
• Functionality cookies.  These are used to recognise you when you return to the Services. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences, for example, your choice of language or region, browsing font size etc.;  
  
  
• Location-based cookies. These cookies are used when you are in Hong Kong, to suggest nearby places of interest, give point-to-point navigation to identify your location and send location-based push notifications to you;
  
  
• Targeting cookies. These cookies record your visit to the Services, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our Services and any material displayed on it more relevant to your interests. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose; and
  
  
• Advertising cookies.  These cookies will remember your preferences, and in general, that you used the Services, to tailor advertising to you and your interests. These cookies are also used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement as well as help measure the effectiveness of advertisements.
  
  

Please note that some cookies on the Website and other parts of the Services are managed by third parties, including, for example, advertising networks, features such as videos, maps and social media API, and providers of external websites like web traffic analysis services. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies. You should refer to the third parties’ own cookie and privacy policies for information about how they may use your information.

The third party cookies we use in our Services, include but are not limited to:

• Google – our Website and Services have embedded Google services/tools, such as ‘Google Maps’ and ‘Google Analytics’ for better user experience and analytics purposes. For details of Google cookies usage, please click here.
  
  
• Google DoubleClick – our Website and Services have embedded Google DoubleClick for analytics and advertising purpose.  For details of Google DoubleClick cookies usage, please click here.
  
  
• Facebook – our Website and Services have embedded Facebook API for social media sharing and advertising purpose. For details of Facebook cookies usage, please click  here.
  
  
• Twitter – our Website and Services have embedded Twitter API for social media sharing and advertising purpose. For details of Twitter cookies usage, please click  here  and here.
  
  
• Pinterest – our Website and Services have embedded Pinterest API for social media sharing and advertising purpose. For details of Pinterest cookies usage, please click  here.
  
  
• Sina Weibo – our China market site has embedded Sina Weibo API for social media sharing and advertising purpose. For details of Sina Weibo cookies usage, please click here (Simplified Chinese only).
  
  
• YouTube – the videos in our Website (except China market site) are hosted in YouTube channel. We embed a unique YouTube hyperlink to show the video on our Website for  advertising purpose. For details of YouTube cookies, please click  here.
  
  
• Instagram – our Website and Services have embedded Instagram API for social media sharing and advertising purpose. For details of Instagram cookies usage, please click  here.
  
  
• Outbrain – our Website and Services have embedded Outbrain cookies for analytics and advertising purposes. For details of Outbrain cookies usage, please click  here.
  
  
• Taboola – our Website and Services have embedded Taboola cookies for analytics and  advertising purposes. For details of Taboola cookies usage, please click  here.
  
  
• Videology – our Website and Services have embedded Videology cookies for analytics and advertising purposes. For details of Videology cookies usage, please click  here.
  
  
• Sojern – our Website and Services have embedded Sojern cookies for analytics and advertising purposes. For details of Sojern cookies usage, please click  here.
  
  
• Adara – our Website and Services have embedded Adara cookies for analytics and advertising purposes. For details of Adara cookies usage, please click  here.
   

In particular, we use Google Analytics cookies to obtain an overall view of visitor habits and visitor volumes, and to help improve the overall experience of our Services.

We use Google Analytics, a third-party web analysis service provided by Google Inc, which uses "performance cookies" and "targeting cookies" to analyse how you use the Website. The information generated by the cookies about your use of the Website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. However, this website uses Google Analytics with the expansion '_anonymizeIp()' which means that Google will truncate/anonymise the last octet of the IP address for Member States of the European Union.

On our behalf Google will use the information collected for the purpose of evaluating your use of our Website, compiling reports on website activity and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage to us. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser as described above. Furthermore you can prevent Google’s collection and use of data (cookies and IP address) by downloading and installing the browser plug-in available under https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en-GB#.  You may disable the use of Google Analytics by using the link disable Google Analytics. This link creates an opt-out cookie which prevents the further processing of your data. For more information about Google Analytics cookies, please see Google's help pages and privacy policy. If you do not accept the use of these cookies, we cannot guarantee how our Services will perform for you.

MANAGING COOKIES SETTINGS

You can block cookies by activating the setting within your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies.  Please be aware if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our Services.

If you wish to change the cookies settings of our website at any time, you can enable/disable certain cookies using our Cookies Setting here . Please note that some of the services will not function so well if cookies are disabled.

For more information about how to do this, please see http://www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/clear-cookies-installed.html, or follow the 'Help' option in your internet browser for more details.