1 – COOKIES USED ON THIS WEB SITE

WE ONLY USE GOOGLE ANALYTICS COOKIES ON THIS WEB SITE

Google Analytics is a simple, easy-to-use tool that helps website owners measure how users interact with website content. As a user navigates between web pages, Google Analytics provides website owners JavaScript tags (libraries) to record information about the page a user has seen, for example the URL of the page. The Google Analytics JavaScript libraries use HTTP Cookies to “remember” what a user has done on previous pages / interactions with the website.

Important: Google Analytics does not collect any personal information about website users. You can read the Google Analytics privacy document for more details.

Further detailed information can be found here.

2 – A BIT ABOUT COOKIES

A cookie is not, contrary to popular belief, a programme and it is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a users web browser while the user is browsing that website. Every time the user loads the website, the browser sends the cookie back to the server to notify the website of the users previous activity. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information (such as items in a shopping cart) or to record the users browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, logging in, or recording which pages were visited by the user as far back as months or years ago).

Although cookies cannot carry viruses and cannot install malware on the host computer, tracking cookies and especially third-party tracking cookies are commonly used as ways to compile long-term records of individuals browsing histories — a potential privacy concern that prompted European and U.S. law makers to take action in 2011. Cookies can also store passwords and form content a user has previously entered, such as a credit card number or an address. When a user accesses a website with a cookie function for the first time, a cookie is sent from server to the browser and stored with the browser in the local computer. Later when that user goes back to the same website, the website will recognize the user because of the stored cookie with the user’s information.

Further information about web site cookies is readily available on the internet such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie (source of the above information in item 2) or at http://www.allaboutcookies.org/cookies/.