What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are stored by the browser (for example, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox or Safari) on your computer or mobile phone. They allow websites to store things like user preferences. You can think of cookies as providing a ‘memory’ for the website, so that it can recognise you when you come back and respond appropriately.

How does the CF10 website use cookies?

A visit to a page on the CF10 website may generate the following types of cookie:

Site performance cookies
Anonymous analytics cookies
Other third party cookies

Site performance cookies

This type of cookie remembers your preferences for tools found on the CF10 website, so you don’t have to re-set them each time you visit. Examples include:

– Volume settings for our video player
– Whether you see the latest or the oldest article comments first
– Video streaming speeds that are compatible with your browser

Anonymous analytics cookies:

Every time someone visits our website, software provided by another organisation generates an “anonymous analytics cookie”.

These cookies can tell us whether or not you have visited the site before.
Your browser will tell us if you have these cookies and, if you don’t, we generate new ones.

This allows us to track how many individual users we have, and how often they visit the site.

Unless you are signed in to the website, we cannot use these cookies to identify individuals. We use them to gather statistics, for example, the number of visits to a page. If you are logged in, we will also know the details you gave to us for this, such as your username and email address.

Other third party cookies

On some pages of our website, other organisations may also set their own anonymous cookies. They do this to track the success of their application, or to customise the application for you. Because of how cookies work, our website cannot access these cookies, nor can the other organisation access the data in cookies we use on our website.

For example, when you share an article using a social-media sharing button (for example, Facebook) on the Guardian, the social network that has created the button will record that you have done this.

How do I turn cookies off?

It is usually possible to stop your browser accepting cookies, or to stop it accepting cookies from a particular website. However, we cannot tell if you are signed in without using cookies, so you would not be able to post comments.

All modern browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. To understand these settings, the following links may be helpful, or you can use the Help option in your browser for more details.

Cookie settings in Internet Explorer
Cookie settings in Firefox
Cookie settings in Chrome
Cookie settings in Safari web and iOS.

Useful links

If you would like to find out more about cookies and their use on the Internet, you may find the following links useful:

Microsoft Cookies guide
All About Cookies

The IAB has provided the following website to give information specifically about privacy issues around Internet advertising:
youronlinechoices.co.uk/uk

For further legal information about privacy issues, you may find these links useful:

Data Protection Act 1998
The Information Commissioner’s Office

If you would like to contact us about cookies please contact us.