What are cookies and how do they work?

Cookies are small bits of text that are downloaded to your computer or mobile device when you visit a website. Your browser sends these cookies back to the website every time you visit the site again, so it can recognise you and can then tailor what you see on the screen.

What do you use cookies for?

Cookies are an important part of the internet. They make using websites much smoother and affect lots of the useful features of websites. There are many different uses for cookies, but they fall into four main groups.

Here are a few examples of just some of the ways that cookies are used to improve your experience on our websites.

• Remembering your preferences and settings, including marketing preferences, such as opting in or out of marketing emails.
• Remembering if you've filled in a survey, so you're not asked to do it again.
• Remembering if you've been to the site before. If you are a first-time user, you might see different content to a regular user.
• Showing you information that's relevant to products of ours that you have.
• Giving you access to content provided by social-media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
• Showing 'related article' links that are relevant to the page you're looking at.

Analytics

We like to keep track of what pages and links are popular and which ones don't get used so much to help us keep our site relevant and up to date. It's also very useful to be able to identify trends of how people navigate (find their way through) our site and if they get 'error messages' from web pages.

This group of cookies, often called 'analytics cookies' are used to gather this information. These cookies don't collect information that identifies you. The information collected is anonymous and is grouped with the information from everyone else’s cookies. We can then see the overall patterns of usage rather than any one person’s activity. Analytics cookies only record activity on the site you are on and they are only used to improve how a website works.

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