What is a cookie?
A cookie is a small text file stored on your computer by your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox etc). Your browser creates and stores this file when instructed to do so by a website and this happens behind-the-scenes, so you don’t particularly realise that it happened.
Despite getting a bad press at times, cookies should not be grouped with “viruses”, “trojans”, “malware” and other scary-sounding IT nasties.
A website typically creates a cookie when there is a genuine and reasonable need to do so and this is most often to:
- record a user’s preferences
- or acknowledge that a user has logged in to the website
- or preserve some information until the user’s next visit
For example, when you enter your location on some websites, your choice is recorded in a cookie so that the next time you visit the site, you may get information relevant to your location.
When you add a product to an online shopping basket, the details might be stored in a cookie so that as you move around the website, the website remembers the contents of your shopping basket.
If a website does not use cookies, it will consider that you are a new visitor every time you visit the site – in other words, that website will have no means of remembering your preferences or keeping you logged in.
Some cookies – commonly known as “tracking cookies” – are used to keep a record of a user’s browsing habits and it’s the use of these cookies and their “big brother” connotations that have caused the recent consternation.
What cookies do we use on our website?
Unless you give consent, no cookies are used on our website. If you give consent, we will use:
- a cookie to record the fact that you have given consent for us to use cookies, so we don’t ask you about this each time you visit the site
- a cookie(s) provided by Google Analytics so that we can collect anonymous statistics about how our website is used
No personal information is stored in these cookies.