What is a cookie?
A lot of websites you visit use cookies to help improve your experience by enabling that website to ‘remember’ you or your preferences, either for the time of your visit (known as a ‘session cookie’) or for every time you visit that site (known as a ‘persistent cookie’).
Cookies have many uses, such as letting you navigate between pages quickly, storing your preferences, and generally improving your visit to the website. Cookies are designed to make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier. For websites that do not use cookies, it will consider you to be a new visitor every time you move to a new page on the site – for example, when you enter your login details and move to another page it will not remember you so for example, it will not be able to keep you logged in.
Some websites also use cookies to enable them to target their advertising or marketing messages based for example, on your location and/or browsing habits.
Cookies can be set in two ways, either by the website you are visiting (‘first party cookies’) or by other websites who run content on the page you are viewing (‘third party cookies’ such as an advert being pulled in from another website).
What is inside a cookie?
A cookie is a simple text file that is stored on your computer or mobile device by a website’s server and only that server can access and read the contents of that cookie. Each cookie is unique to your web browser. It will contain information such as a unique identifier and the site name and some digits and numbers. It allows a website to remember things like your preferences, log in details or what’s in your shopping basket.
What to do if you don’t want cookies on your computer or mobile device?
Some people find websites storing and accessing information on their computer or mobile device a bit intrusive, particularly when this information is stored and used by a third party website without their consent. Although this is usually harmless you may not, for example, want to see advertising that has been targeted to your interests. If you prefer, it is possible to block some or all cookies, or even to delete cookies that have already been set; but you need to be aware that you might lose some functions of that website. To turn off cookies, please consult the Help file contained within your web browser.
