Cookies Policy

Divers Alert Network Southern Africa NPC (“DANSA”, “we”, “us”, “our”) website belongs to and is operated by DANSA. This Cookies Policy sets out the rules that govern our use of cookies. By using the website, you consent to the use of cookies to track your activity on https://www.dansa.org/. You will have seen a pop-up to this effect on your first visit to this website; although it will not usually appear on subsequent visits, you may withdraw your consent at any time by following the instructions below.

The information we collect using cookies helps us understand clients/ users of our website(s) better so that we can provide a more focused user experience. Cookies basically have two functions:

• Remember information previously entered by users.
• Site preferences, and records users’ browsing activities (e.g. which pages are visited, each time and how often buttons are pressed).

We use cookies principally because we want to make our website(s) and mobile application(s) (if any) user-friendly and work more efficiently, and we are interested in anonymous user behaviour. Cookies are also used to provide information to owners of websites. Generally, cookies do not store sensitive or personally identifiable information such as your name and address or credit card details.

In the unlikely event that this website uses cookies to store Personal Information about you, DANSA encrypts the Personal Information to prevent unauthorised use by anyone else.

Cookies are files which are stored on your computer, smartphone, tablet or other devices when you browse the internet. They are designed to hold data specific to a particular user and website and can be accessed either by a web server or the user’s computer or device. This allows a website to deliver a page specifically tailored to a particular user (which is why you get all those targeted ads), or the page itself can contain some script which is aware of the data in the cookie and so is able to carry information from one visit to the website (or related site) to the next. For example, Cookies can:

• help search engines remember that you want your search results in English;
• help a website remember your preferences so that you don’t need to customise it every time;
• help websites to deliver a better service by showing you the content most relevant to you;
• identify and resolve errors; and
• analyse how well a website is performing.

The most common function of cookies is to remember bits of information that help make browsing the web easier and more hassle-free for you.

All modern browsers have tools to help you delete or block cookies. But it’s important to remember that many websites- including the DANSA website(s)- need cookies in order to function properly. By deleting or blocking cookies, you also block certain personalised features, and you may not be able to take full advantage of some of the website’s features.

For greater detail about cookies, here are a few websites for reference:

www.allaboutcookies.org / www.youronlinechoices.eu / www.termsfeed.com

a) Strictly Necessary Cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our website (if any are available on the website). These cookies, for instance, allow you to navigate back and forth between pages without losing their previous action from the same session. These cookies must be present for our website to provide the basic functions of the website. Because these cookies are strictly necessary, we do not need to ask for your consent to use them.

b) Analytical/ Performance Cookies. These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance, which pages visitors go to most often. The information gathered does not identify any individual visitor and is aggregated. It includes the number of visits to our website, the websites that referred them to our website and the pages that they visited on our website. They may also show us which email visitors may have clicked through from in order to visit our website, and whether you opened an email we sent you.

Analytics cookies, set using third-party web analytics software, allow us to monitor our website traffic. These cookies may also tell us how many of our visitors are male or female and may summarise the number of visitors who fall within certain age ranges, or certain interest categories. However, this sort of information is not linked to any individual; it just shows us what percentage of our visitors fall in particular categories. Performance cookies are further used to enhance the performance and functionality of our Services but are non-essential to their use. However, without these cookies, certain functionality like videos (if any) may become unavailable.

c) Functionality Cookies. These cookies allow our website to remember users’ site preferences and choices they make on the website (such as your username, language, and region) and provide enhanced, more personal features. They are also used to prevent us from offering you a service that we already offered or a service that you declined. These cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts and other parts of webpages that you can customise.

They may also be used to provide services you have asked for such as watching a video or comment on a blog. The information these cookies collect may be anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other websites. They can be first party, third-party, session or persistent cookies. They are tailored to respond only to the service requested by you. By using our website, you agree we may place these types of cookies on your device.

d) Social Networking Cookies. These cookies allow users to share content on social media platforms and help link activity between a website and third-party sharing platforms.

e) Behaviourally Targeted Advertising Cookies. These cookies record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. They are specifically designed to gather information from users on their devices to display advertisements based on relevant topics of interest. They are also used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement as well as to help measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. These cookies remember that you have visited our website and use this information to tailor advertising for our products and/ or services when you visit third-party websites The information on the users gathered by the cookies may be shared with other advertisers to measure the performance of their advertisements. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose. They are mainly third-party cookies on our website and are placed by advertising networks.

You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them in the table below. Take note the below table shows cookies placed by https://www.dansa.org is not exhaustive and serves only as an indicator of the types of cookies we may use on the DANSA website from time to time:

Please note that third parties (including, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/ performance cookies or targeting/ advertising cookies.

Third-party vendors, including but not limited to Google and MSN/ Bing may be used to show DANSA-related ads on other sites on the internet. Third-party vendors use cookies to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to our site(s) or other websites. Users may opt-out of Google’s use of cookies by visiting the Google Advertising Settings Page or the Network Advertising Initiative's opt-out page for other third-party vendors’ use of cookies.

We may update this Cookies Policy from time to time in order to reflect, for example, changes to the cookies we use or for other operational, legal or regulatory reasons. Please, therefore, re-visit this policy regularly to stay informed about our use of cookies and related technologies. Refer to the date in the footer of this Cookies Policy for the last update.

All modern browsers have tools to help you delete or block cookies. It is important to remember, however, that many websites - including https://www.dansa.org/ - need cookies to function properly. By deleting or disabling cookies, you could also block certain personalised features and you may not be able to take full advantage of some of the website’s features. If you would like to opt out of Google Analytics’ cookies, you can find more on the Google website (click on the link).

To turn cookies off for all websites via your web browser, follow the instructions in the table below. (Please note that the list is only applicable to the browsers mentioned and is different on PC and Mac).

Google Chrome

• Click on “Menu” icon (top right-hand corner below exit icon)
• Click “Settings”
• Under Privacy and security section click on “Cookies and other site data”
• Enable or disable cookies.
  • To enable cookies, select “Allow all cookies” (recommended)
  • To disable cookies, select “Block all cookies” (not recommended)

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.0+

• Click on “Tools” icon
• Select “Internet options”
• Click on “Privacy” tab
• Click on “Advanced” tab
• Make selection on how cookies are handled

Mozilla Firefox

• Click on “Menu” icon (top right-hand corner below exit icon)
• Click on “Options”
• Click on “Privacy & Security”
• Scroll down to “Cookies and Site Data”
• Make selection on how cookies are handled

Safari

• Click on “Menu” icon (top right-hand corner)
• Click on “Privacy” tab
• Scroll down to bottom of page and select “Privacy & cookies”
• Make selection on how cookies are handled

Where the organisation setting the cookies provides an automated disabling tool in respect of its cookies, we may list the name of that organisation, the category of cookies it sets, together with a link to its automated disabling tool; take note, however, that this may not always be the case. In all other cases, we may list the names of the cookies themselves and their source at the date of this Cookies Policy so that you can easily identify and disable them if you want to through your browser controls.

After your initial visit to our website, we may change the cookies we use. This Cookies Policy will always indicate who the provider placing cookies is, and for what purpose and give you the means to disable them so you should check it from time to time.