What is a cookie?
Most websites you visit will use cookies in order to improve your user experience by enabling that website to "remember" you, either for the duration of your visit (using a "session cookie") or for repeat visits (using a "persistent cookie").
Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, storing your preferences, and generally improving your experience of a website. Cookies make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier. If a website doesn't use cookies, it will think you are 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 won't recognise you and it won't be able to keep you logged in.
Some websites will also use cookies to enable them to target their advertising or marketing messages based for example, on your location and/or browsing habits.
Cookies may be set by the website you are visiting ("first party cookies") or they may be set by other websites who run content on the page you are viewing ("third party cookies").
What to do if you don't want cookies to be set
Some people find the idea of a website storing information on their computer or mobile device a bit intrusive, particularly when this information is stored and used by a third party without them knowing. Although this is generally quite 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.
How do I disable cookies?
If you want to disable cookies you need to change your website browser settings to reject cookies. How to do this will depend on the browser you use and we provide further detail below on how to disable cookies for the most popular browsers:-
For Google Chrome:
1. Click on the "spanner" icon then "Settings"
2. Scroll down to Privacy and click on "Content settings"
For Microsoft Internet Explorer:
1. Choose the menu "tools" then "Internet Options"
2 Click on the "privacy" tab
3 Select the setting the appropriate setting
For Mozilla firefox:
1. Choose the menu "tools" then "Options"
2 Click on the icon "privacy"
3 Find the menu "cookie" and select the relevant options
For Opera 6.0 and further:
1. Choose the menu Files> Preferences
2 Privacy
What happens if I disable cookies?
This depends on which cookies you disable, but in general the site may not operate properly if cookies are switched off.
Cookie Name
Purpose
PHPSESSID Standard session created for passing site varibles to pages. This session expires once the viewer leaves the site.
__utma Used by Google Analytics. Each unique browser that visits a page on the site is provided with a unique ID via the __utma cookie. In this way, subsequent visits to the website via the same browser are recorded as belonging to the same (unique) visitor. Thus, if a person interacted with the website using different browsers, the Analytics reports would track this activity under two unique visitors. Similarly if the same browser were used by two different visitors, but with a separate computer account for each, the activity would be recorded under two unique visitor IDs. On the other hand, if the browser happens to be used by two different people sharing the same computer account, one unique visitor ID is recorded, even though two unique individuals accessed the site.
__utmb, __utmc Google Analytics uses these two cookies to establish a session. If either of these two cookies is absent, further activity by the user initiates the start of a new session.
__utmz When visitors reach the site via a search engine result, a direct link, or an ad that links to the page, Google Analytics stores the type of referral information in a cookie. The parameters in the cookie value string are parsed and sent in the GIF Request (in the utmcc variable). The expiration date for the cookie is set as 6 months into the future. This cookie gets updated with each subsequent page view to the site; thus it is used to determine visitor navigation within the site.
