What is a cookie?
Cookies are small text files that are sent to your computer when you visit a website. Cookies on Novartis’ websites do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, storing your preferences and generally improving your experience of a website.
The EU Directive 2009/136/EC states that we can store cookies on your machine, if they are essential to the operation of this Site, but that for all others we need your permission to do so.
Novartis’ websites can use some non-essential cookies. We do not do this to track individual users or to identify them, but to gain useful knowledge about how the websites are used so that we can keep improving them for our users. Without the knowledge we gain from the systems that use these cookies we would not be able to provide the service we do.
The types of cookies we use
If you decide to set the language, font-size or specific version of the Site (e.g. high-contrast), we use “user interface customization cookies”. Once set, you do not need to specify your preferences again on another visit to the Site.
Novartis likes to understand how visitors use our websites by using web analytics services. They count the number of visitors and tell us things about the visitors’ behavior overall – such as identifying the search engine keywords that lead the user to the site, the typical length of stay on the site or the average number of pages a user views. For this purpose we place a “first party analytics cookie” on your computer.
We may also use services such as Google Analytics to track web statistics. In this case, Google will place a “3rd party cookie” on your computer.
Any data collected by using these cookies will be stored and managed by Novartis in countries Novartis operates in.
How to control cookies
If you don’t want to receive cookies, you can modify your browser so that it notifies you when cookies are sent to it or you can refuse cookies altogether. You can also delete cookies that have already been set.
If you wish to restrict or block web browser cookies which are set on your device then you can do this through your browser settings; the Help function within your browser should tell you how.