What are cookies?
For almost any modern website to work properly, it needs to collect certain basic information on its users. To do this, a site will create files known as cookies – which are small text files – on its users’ computers. These cookies are designed to allow the website to recognise its users on subsequent visits, or to authorise other designated websites to recognise these users for a particular purpose.
Cookies do a lot of different jobs which make your experience of the Internet much smoother and more interactive. For instance, they are used to remember your preferences on sites you visit often, to remember your user ID and the contents of your shopping baskets, and to help you navigate between pages more efficiently. They also help ensure that the advertisements that you see online are more relevant to you and your interests. Much, though not all, of the data that they collect is anonymous, though some of it is designed to detect browsing patterns and approximate geographical location to improve user experience.
Some websites may also contain images called ‘web beacons’ (also known as ‘clear gifs’). Web beacons only collect limited information, including a cookie number, a timestamp, and a record of the page on which they are placed. Websites may also carry web beacons placed by third party advertisers. These beacons do not carry any personally identifiable information and are only used to track the effectiveness of a particular campaign (for example by counting the number of visitors).
Information collected by cookies and web beacons is not personally identifiable.
How do we use cookies?
We collect a number of cookies from our users for various reasons, not least to track our own performance – but also to let us serve you content tailored to your own specifications, hopefully improving your overall experience of the site. Amongst other things, the cookies we use allow users to register to make comments, allow us to calculate how many visitors we have – anonymously, of course – and how long they stay on our site.
We do our utmost to respect users’ privacy. We use cookies to monitor and improve our services, but they do also allow us to sell advertising space, which helps keeps us free to our readers. We sometimes include links on our site to goods and services offered by third parties and we may be paid some commission if you subsequently decide to make a purchase. Cookies may be used to track your visits to third party sites to help ensure that we are paid the correct amounts. Please note that these commercial arrangements do not influence our editorial content in any way.
We believe that your experience of the site would be adversely affected if you opted out of the cookies we use.
What types of cookie are there and which ones do we use?
There are two types of cookie:
Cookies also have, broadly speaking, four different functions and can be categorised as follow: ‘strictly necessary’ cookies, ‘performance’ cookies, ‘functionality’ cookies and ‘targeting’ or ‘advertising’ cookies.
Strictly necessary cookies are essential to navigate around a website and use its features. Without them, you wouldn’t be able to use basic services like registration or shopping baskets. These cookies do not gather information about you that could be used for marketing or remembering where you’ve been on the internet.
Examples of how we use ‘strictly necessary’ cookies include:
Setting unique identifiers for each unique visitor, so site numbers can be analysed.
Allowing you to sign in to The Independent website as a registered user.
Performance cookies collect anonymous data for statistical purposes on how visitors use a website, they don’t contain personal information, and are used to improve your user experience of a website.
Here are some examples of how we use performance cookies:
Gathering data about visits to the Website, including numbers of visitors and visits, length of time spent on the site, pages clicked on or where visitors have come from.
For comparison with other websites using data collected by industry-accepted measurement and research companies.
Information supplied by performance cookies helps us to understand how you use the Website; for example, whether or not you have visited before, what you looked at or clicked on and how you found us. We can then use this data to help improve our services. We generally use independent analytics companies to perform these services for us and when this is the case, these cookies may be set by a third party company (third party cookies).
If you have registered with the Website we can combine the data from the web analytics services and their cookies with the information you have supplied to us, so that we can make your experience more personal by recommending certain programmes to you based on your viewing behaviour or tailoring your emails with content you might find more interesting. We would only do this if you have given us permission to communicate with you. Sometimes the data used from the web analytics companies has been collected before you registered or signed in. In these cases, if we use this data to identify you, we use it only in accordance with our privacy policy.
Functionality cookies allow users to customise how a website looks for them: they can remember usernames, language preferences and regions, and can be used to provide more personal services like local weather reports and traffic news.
User agreement
By continuing to use our site, you agree to the placement of cookies on your device. If you choose not to receive our cookies, we cannot guarantee that your experience will be as fulfilling as it would otherwise be. For instance, the site won’t be able to recognise your commenter ID, meaning that you won’t be able to leave comments.