Our Cookies Policy

Your Digital Journey, Our Commitment to Transparency

Welcome to the official website of the Van Gogh Museum. Like many professional websites, we use cookies to provide you with a smooth, personalized, and engaging online experience. This Cookies Policy explains what cookies are, how we use them, the types of cookies we place on your device, and how you can manage your preferences.

We are dedicated to protecting your privacy and ensuring transparency about how your data is collected and used. By continuing to browse our website, you are consenting to our use of cookies in accordance with this policy. We encourage you to read this policy in conjunction with our Privacy Policy to gain a comprehensive understanding of our data handling practices.

What Are Cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are downloaded to your computer or mobile device when you visit a website. They are widely used by website owners to make their websites work, or to work more efficiently, as well as to provide reporting information. Cookies can be "persistent" or "session" cookies. Persistent cookies remain on your personal computer or mobile device when you go offline, while session cookies are deleted as soon as you close your web browser.

Cookies play several crucial roles, such as remembering your preferences, helping us understand how you interact with our content, and enabling certain functionalities that enhance your browsing. Without cookies, certain parts of our website might not function correctly, or your experience might be less convenient.

How We Utilize Cookies

The Van Gogh Heritage Foundation, operating the Van Gogh Museum website, uses cookies for various purposes aimed at improving your visit. These include:

• Website Functionality: Ensuring our website operates correctly, remembering your session state, and handling navigation.
• Personalization: Remembering your preferences and settings, such as language choices or display options, to tailor your experience.
• Analytics and Performance: Understanding how visitors interact with our website, which pages are most popular, and identifying areas for improvement. This helps us refine our content and layout.
• Security: Enhancing the security of our website and protecting your data during your visit.
• Marketing and Advertising: Delivering relevant content and advertisements based on your interests and browsing behavior.

Our goal is to use cookies responsibly, enhancing your museum experience both online and offline, while respecting your privacy choices.

Types of Cookies We May Place on Your Device

We categorize the cookies we use to help you understand their purpose:

1. Strictly Necessary Cookies

These cookies are essential for our website to perform its basic functions. They enable you to navigate the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas, adding items to a cart, or remembering your cookie consent choices. The website cannot function properly without these cookies, and they are always active. They typically do not store any personally identifiable information.

• Purpose: To enable core site functionality.
• Example: Session cookies for login, cookie consent preferences.

2. Performance and Analytics Cookies

These cookies collect information about how visitors use our website, for instance, which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. These cookies don't collect information that identifies a visitor. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. It is only used to improve how a website works.

• Purpose: To measure and improve the performance of our website.
• Example: Google Analytics cookies for website traffic analysis.

3. Functional Cookies

Functional cookies allow our website to remember choices you make (such as your username, language, or the region you are in) and provide enhanced, more personal features. For instance, our website may remember changes you have made to text size, fonts, and other parts of web pages that you can customize. They may also be used to provide services you have asked for, such as watching a video or commenting on a blog.

• Purpose: To remember your preferences and provide enhanced functionality.
• Example: Language preference cookies, video player settings.

4. Targeting and Advertising Cookies

These cookies are used to deliver advertisements more relevant to you and your interests. They are also used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement as well as help measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaigns. They are usually placed by advertising networks with the website operator’s permission. They remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organizations such as advertisers. Quite often, targeting or advertising cookies will be linked to site functionality provided by the other organization.

• Purpose: To deliver personalized advertisements and content.
• Example: Cookies from social media platforms or advertising partners for remarketing.

Third-Party Cookies

In addition to our own cookies, we may also use various third-parties’ cookies to report usage statistics of the website, deliver advertisements on and through the website, and so on. These third-party cookies are set by entities other than the Van Gogh Heritage Foundation. For example, embedded content from social media platforms (like Twitter or Instagram) or video hosting services (like YouTube) might set their own cookies. We have limited control over these cookies, and we recommend reviewing the respective privacy policies of these third parties.

Managing Your Cookie Preferences

You have the right to decide whether to accept or reject cookies. You can exercise your cookie preferences by adjusting the settings within your web browser. Most web browsers allow you to control cookies through their settings preferences. However, if you limit the ability of websites to set cookies, you may worsen your overall user experience as it will no longer be personalized to you. It may also stop you from saving customized settings like login information.

Below are links to manage cookies in popular browsers:

• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Microsoft Edge
• Apple Safari

Additionally, for advertising cookies, you can often opt out of personalized advertising by visiting the Your Online Choices website or the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page. Please note that opting out of advertising cookies does not mean you will not see any advertisements; it simply means that the advertisements you see may be less relevant to your interests.

When you first visit our website, you will be presented with a cookie consent banner, allowing you to accept all cookies, customize your preferences, or reject non-essential cookies. You can always revisit these settings by clicking on the "Cookie Settings" link typically found in the website footer or within your browser settings.

Changes to Our Cookies Policy

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. The latest version of this policy will always be available on our website, and we will indicate the "Effective Date" at the top of the policy.

We encourage you to review this Cookies Policy periodically to stay informed about our use of cookies and related technologies. Your continued use of the website after any changes to this policy will signify your acceptance of such changes.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or concerns about our use of cookies or this Cookies Policy, please do not hesitate to contact our dedicated Privacy Officer, Mr. Jasper van der Velde, at the Van Gogh Heritage Foundation.

Van Gogh Heritage Foundation
Vincent van Goghplein 1
1071 HR Amsterdam
Netherlands
Email: privacy@vangoghheritage.nl
Phone: +31 6 96648055

Effective Date: January 1, 2025