Cookies

What are cookies:

A cookie is a small piece of text sent to your browser by a website you visit. It helps the website to remember information about your visit, like your preferred language and other settings. That can make your next visit easier and the site more useful to you. Cookies play an important role. Without them, using the web would be a much more frustrating experience.

Most browsers support cookies, but users can set their browsers to decline them and can delete them whenever they like.

Description

Websites mainly use cookies to:

• identify users
• remember users' custom preferences
• help users complete tasks without having to re‑enter information when browsing from one page to another \ or when visiting the site later.

How are they used?

The web server supplying the webpage can store a cookie on the user's computer or mobile device. An external web server that manages files included or referenced in the webpage is also able to store cookies. All these cookies are called http header cookies. Another way of storing cookies is through JavaScript code contained or referenced in that page.

Each time the user requests a new page, the web server can receive the values of the cookies it previously set and return the page with content relating to these values. Similarly, JavaScript code is able to read a cookie belonging to its domain and perform an action accordingly.

What are the different types of cookies?

A cookie can be classified by its lifespan and the domain to which it belongs. By lifespan, a cookie is either a:

• session cookie which is erased when the user closes the browser or
• persistent cookie which remains on the user's computer/device for a pre-defined period of time.

As for the domain to which it belongs, there are either:

• first-party cookies which are set by the web server of the visited page and share the same domain
• third-party cookies stored by a different domain to the visited page's domain. This can happen when the webpage references a file, such as JavaScript, located outside its domain.

How can you manage cookies?

You can manage/delete cookies as you wish - for details, see aboutcookies.org.

Removing cookies from your device

You can delete all cookies that are already on your device by clearing the browsing history of your browser. This will remove all cookies from all websites you have visited.

Be aware though that you may also lose some saved information (e.g. saved login details, site preferences).

Managing site-specific cookies

For more detailed control over site-specific cookies, check the privacy and cookie settings in your preferred browser

Blocking cookies

You can set most modern browsers to prevent any cookies being placed on your device, but you may then have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit a site/page. And some services and functionalities may not work properly at all (e.g. profile logging-in).