Session cookies – these are temporary and are erased when you close your browser at the end of your surfing session. The next time you visit that particular site it will not recognise you and will treat you as a completely new visitor as there is nothing in your browser to let the site know that you have visited before.

 

Persistent cookies – these remain on your hard drive until you erase them or they expire. How long a cookie remains on your browser depends on how long the visited website has programmed the cookie to last.

 

Any cookies that have the sole purpose of making the website work. They will always be first party, and for the most part session cookies. They would usually be used solely to enable site navigation, like maintaining a persistent user session across pages. They are cookies that would fall under the ‘strictly necessary’ exemption for consent in the regulations.

 

These are cookies that are designed to enhance the core user experience on the site, or help with measuring site performance. Google Analytics cookies, fall into this category. Google Analytics is a cookie technology that enables the tracking of website visitor numbers and areas of the website visited. This information is provided by software that is provided by Google. This category is always first party and may include both session and persistent cookies. These cookies have a longer life span than 30 days and can be cleared from your browser at any time.

 

These are cookies that might be used to store more personally identifiable information or can be used for limited cross-site tracking. This category includes first party cookies that track or control the user experience within a site in a way that might not be obvious to the user or under their control. A cookie that enables a website to present content based on previous visits by that user or based on personal information would be good examples. Cookies used by many types of social networking services and set by sharing buttons would fall into this category. These cookies are only able to track a user if they have previously signed in and agreed to their terms and conditions thus they do not affect all visitors. This would also include third party cookies that enable certain types of plug-ins and widgets to be added to a site to enhance user functionality, but are not identifying visitors or tracking behaviour across other domains, unless they have otherwise opted-in or signed up directly with that provider. Cookies used by many types of social networking services, and set by sharing buttons, would fall into this category because they are only able to track a user who has previously signed in and agreed to site’s terms and conditions, so they don’t affect all visitors. The Twitter Follow button is a good example of this. It can set cookies used for tracking and user profiling, but only if that user has a Twitter account.

 

Any cookies that are mainly intended to track and record visitor interests, without any kind of prior consent, and to aggregate that data across sites for the benefit of third parties would fall into this category. This would include all types of cookies served by online advertising and also cookies set through the provision of embedded content that is not directly advertising related. Embedded YouTube videos, or Google Maps set and retrieve cookies which could be used to track users across sites, even if they are not used to then serve up adverts. The vast majority of third party cookies would fall into this category.

 

You can set up your website browser to refuse cookies or to alert you to their presence and thereby allow you to remove them from your computer. Please remember that by disabling cookies the performance of the site will be affected and some parts of it, especially the bookshop and subscriptions, may not work at all.