This page outlines the cookie policy for the UK Research and Innovation (‘UKRI’, ‘we’, ‘us’ or ‘our’) website. Your use of this website is subject to our terms of use.
When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. This sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, your computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.
Cookies are used to improve services for you, for example by:
- enabling a service to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information during one task
- recognising that you have already given a username and password so you don’t need to enter it for every web page requested
- measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and that there is enough capacity to ensure they are fast.
You can learn about cookies and how to manage them (All About Cookies).
Cookies used on our website
Cookie Control panel cookies
CookieControl
Purpose: to hold setting on whether to allow cookies to be stored or not
Expires: 10 days
Google Analytics cookies
Our website uses Google Analytics. It installs cookies to help us identify errors and accurately estimate visitor numbers. These cookies do not collect personal data about visitors to our website.
_ga
Purpose: used to distinguish users.
Expires: two years
_gat_UA-150290826-1
Purpose: used to throttle the request rate – limiting the collection of data on high traffic sites.
Expires: one minute
_gat_UA-102208639-1
Purpose: used to throttle the request rate – limiting the collection of data on high traffic sites.
Expires: one minute
_gid
Purpose: used to distinguish users.
Expires: 24 hours
For further information on cookies used by this website please contact us.
Email: web@ukri.org
Hotjar Cookies
Hotjar is a technology service used by UKRI that helps us better understand our users’ experience. For example:
- how much time they spend on particular pages
- which pages they spend most time on
- which links they choose to click
- what users do and don’t like.
This enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback.
Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data relating to our users’ behaviour and their devices. This includes:
- screen size
- device type (unique device identifiers)
- browser information.
Hotjar stores this information on our behalf in a pseudonymised user profile.
Hotjar is contractually forbidden to sell any of the data collected on our behalf.
_hjSessionUser{site_id}
A Hotjar cookie that is set when a user first lands on a page with the Hotjar script. It is used to persist the Hotjar User ID, unique to that site on the browser. This ensures that behaviour in subsequent visits to the same site will be attributed to the same user ID.
Expires: 365 days
JSON
_hjSession{site_id}
A cookie that holds the current session data. This ensues that subsequent requests within the session window will be attributed to the same Hotjar session.
Expires: 30 minutes
JSON
_hjShownFeedbackMessage
A Hotjar cookie that is set when a user minimises or completes incoming feedback so that it will load as minimised immediately if the user navigates to another page on which it is set to show.
Expires: 365 days
Boolean true/false
_hjSessionTooLarge
Causes Hotjar to stop collecting data if a session becomes too large. This is determined automatically by a signal from the WebSocket server if the session size exceeds the limit.
Expires: session
Boolean true/false
_hjSessionRejected
If present, this cookie will be set to ‘1’ for the duration of a user’s session, if Hotjar rejected the session from connecting to our WebSocket due to server overload. This cookie is only applied in extremely rare situations to prevent severe performance issues.
Expires: session
Boolean true/false
_hjSessionResumed
A cookie that is set when a session/recording is reconnected to Hotjar servers after a break in connection.
Expires: session
Boolean true/false
_hjid
A Hotjar cookie that is set when the customer first lands on a page with the Hotjar script. It is used to persist the Hotjar User ID, unique to that site on the browser. This ensures that behaviour in subsequent visits to the same site will be attributed to the same user ID.
Expires: 365 days
UUID
_hjRecordingLastActivity
This should be found in session storage (as opposed to cookies). It gets updated when a user recording starts and when data is sent through the WebSocket (the user performs an action that Hotjar records).
Expires: session
Numerical Value (Timestamp)
_hjTLDTest
When the Hotjar script executes, we try to determine the most generic cookie path we should use, instead of the page hostname. This way cookies can be shared across subdomains (where applicable).
To determine this, we try to store the _hjTLDTest cookie for different URL substring alternatives until it fails. After this check, the cookie is removed.
Expires: session
Boolean true/false
_hjUserAttributesHash
User attributes sent through the Hotjar Identify API are cached for the duration of the session in order to show when an attribute has changed and needs to be updated.
Expires: session
Hash
_hjCachedUserAttributes
This cookie stores user attributes that are sent through the Hotjar Identify API whenever the user is not in the sample. .
Collected attributes will only be saved to Hotjar servers if the user interacts with a Hotjar feedback tool, but the cookie will be used regardless of whether a feedback tool is present.
Expires: session
JSON
_hjLocalStorageTest
This cookie is used to check if the Hotjar tracking script can use local storage. If it can, a value of 1 is set in this cookie. The data stored in_hjLocalStorageTest has no expiration time, but it is deleted almost immediately after it is created.
Expires: under 100ms
Boolean true/false
_hjIncludedInPageviewSample
This cookie is set to let Hotjar know whether that user is included in the data sampling defined by your site’s pageview limit.
Expires: 30 minutes
Boolean true/false
_hjAbsoluteSessionInProgress
This cookie is used to detect the first page view session of a user. This is a true/false flag set by the cookie.
Expires: 30 Minutes
Boolean true/false
_hjFirstSeen
This is set to identify a new user’s first session. It stores a true/false value, indicating whether this was the first time Hotjar saw this user. It is used by recording filters to identify new user sessions.
Expires: session
Boolean true/false
_hjViewportId
This stores information about the user viewport such as size and dimensions.
Expires: session
UUID
_hjRecordingEnabled
This is added when a recording starts and is read when the recording module is initialised to see if the user is already in a recording in a particular session.
Expires: session
Boolean true/false
Additional cookies for UKRI funding service users
We use the following cookies to track usage and authenticate users in our new funding service for applicants.
Tracking cookies
These cookies are deployed if the user accepts cookies.
allow_all_cookies
Purpose: to track whether you have accepted our cookie policy. It is automatically cleared every 30 days.
Expires: 30 days
_gid
Purpose: used by Google Analytics to track users’ journeys through the service to improve their experience.
Expires: one day
_gat_UA_XXXXXX
Purpose: used by Google Analytics to limit the amount of data recorded by Google on high-traffic-volume websites.
Expires: one minute
_ga
Purpose: used by Google Analytics to uniquely identify users.
Expires: two years
Strictly necessary cookies
These cookies are required for the service to operate and are always used.
ukri-tfs-local-session
Purpose: to authenticate users on our service and allow them to remain signed in.
Expires: 25 minutes
Last updated: 26 January 2022