What are cookies?

Cookies are just tiny data files generated and stored in the web browser. They can help websites 'remember' things to make your life easier or send everything you do someone else.

Some cookies may only store small strings (text) or integers (numbers). Others may be significantly larger and store whole datasets. This flexibility and their excellent efficiency make them popular with web developers.

Cookies are mostly good and an essential function on most websites. This is particularly true for websites that provide online checkouts, location services, contact forms, secure logins or important functionality like language switchers. The modern internet simply could not work without cookies.

But there are some evil cookies out there too. Cookies which we might not be aware of and can be used to take sensitive information. Not nice and thats what we want to stop.

You can also get caught where there are other scripts and services that can lurk in websites. These can watch what we view or where we are currently located. These might be used by big businesses to target us with adverts or other marketing, against our wishes. On this site we try to make it explicit - you need to opt in to things that may have such scripts (like you tube).

Privacy can be confusing. But is a major factor all website owners and users need to address. Powerful laws like GDPR have come into force, to try and address privacy and tracking concerns. Website owners have a legal duty to comply with these laws, however we believe we need to do even better. Transparency is one of our principles. And we should walk the talk.

So, our privacy policy is a bit longer than most - feel free to browse through it and you might learn a thing or two.

If you ever want to see what cookies are in your web browser, open the developer tools and click on the Storage tab. Safari, Firefox and Chrome web browsers all support this. On our site go to the cookie table page.