McGill.CA / McGill University

Cookie Notice

This Cookie Notice on the use of analytical tools and cookies ("Cookie Notice") describes how and why McGill University (“McGill”, “we”, “us” or “our”) uses cookies, web beacons and other identification, profiling, and location technologies on our websites and in our electronic promotional communications, as the case may be.

What are cookies and web beacons?

Cookies are small text files that are downloaded on your device when you visit a website, use a mobile application, or download an e-mail. Cookies allow a website to recognize a device and store information about it. “Pixels” or “Web beacons,” are tiny image files placed on a website to assess how a user interacts with specific content.

What categories of cookies do we use and why?

We use the following categories of cookies:

Essential cookies

Essential cookies are necessary for our websites to function and cannot be switched off in our systems. You can reject essential cookies in your web browser’s settings, but this may mean some parts of our websites don’t work. Essential cookies collect information such as browser type, screen size, and language preference. They don’t collect any personally identifiable information about you, and they don’t track your browsing habits.

Performance cookies

Performance cookies gather statistics about how you use our websites and allow us to improve our websites’ performance. Performance cookies collect information such as pages viewed, idle time on a page, loading speeds, links clicked, and scrolling or hover patterns.

We use services such as Google Analytics and Hotjar to collect and analyze performance data. To learn more about how your performance data is used and stored by each of these tools, consult the Google Privacy policy and Hotjar Privacy policy.

Google Analytics

We use Google Analytics to collect information about how visitors use our websites, including the country and city from which you access our websites, demographic information based on information Google already has about you from your interactions with other websites, and the number of visitors to our websites and the pages visited.

You can deactivate Google Analytics profiling by following the steps.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a tool that helps us better understand the experience of visitors to our websites (for example, how long they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users like and dislike, etc.) and this allows us to build and maintain our services with user feedback.

Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data about the behaviour of our users and their devices (in particular device IP address (only in anonymous form), device screen size, device type (unique device identifier), browser information, geographic location (country only), language used to display our websites). Hotjar stores this information in a pseudonymized user profile.

You may object to the creation of a user profile and to Hotjar's retention of data about your use of our websites and the use of cookies for profiling purposes on other websites.

Marketing cookies

Marketing Cookies are used to deliver personalized experiences across platforms like Facebook, Google, and Instagram based on your browsing history. Such cookies recognize users of these social media sites when you view social media content on our websites. We use marketing services to track and optimize engagement with our advertising. We do not control third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. Please refer to any third party’s privacy policy for information on what information they collect, how they use it, and how long it is stored.

We use the following marketing cookie services, all of which track “clicks” on specific advertisements. See the links below to view the privacy policies of each service.

Embedded Remote Content

In addition, we embed remote content from the following websites using internal HTML frames (iframes). This allows our 3rd party system suppliers to set cookies and/or capture user data via other means for marketing, tracking or user authentication purposes. The links below enable the user to understand the terms of use, including how to opt out or block this data collection.

Why do we use cookies on our websites?

We use cookies and web beacons to:

  • Measure and analyze traffic on our websites, including how you interact with our websites;
  • Adjust websites settings to suit your device;
  • Help us understand how people use our services and interact with our promotional material, so that we can improve them;
  • Analyze your interaction with other pages and websites; and
  • Help us personalize our approach, responses, and services by remembering your preferences.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this Cookie Notice or the protection of your Personal Information, please contact our Access and Privacy office at: privacy.secretariat [at] mcgill.ca.

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