Cookies are always a bit contentious. They are little fragments of information that a website collects, usually portrayed as evil little things that allow websites to follow you about the web.
In reality, most of them are very benign. Just collecting demographic data. For instance, roughly from where in the world you are visiting from, the site that led you to this one, the browser and operating system used to view it and last date and time that you visited the site, if ever.
It is not much use to anyone really. Apart from web developers and people that study web traffic for trends. Web developers use them for debugging issues so that an issue can be replicated using the same browser, operating system etc. The web trends will tell us the demograph of the people that visited the site, which pages they visited and how long they spent there.
Contrary to popular belief, cookies collect anonymous data, they cannot recognise you as a person or anything else for that matter.
Yes, there are nefarious cookies out there used by unscrupulous web sites, but they will most certainly not be found here, and would most certainly be uncovered by anti-virus precautions. However, please let us know if you spot anything suspicious.
The cookies used on this site
We use Google Analytics for the visitor demographic data and journey through the site. They use four types of cookies listed with their uses and duration below:
We may also use session cookies. These are tiny text files that have a lifespan of a 'session'. A session starts when you enter the website and ends when you leave. Session cookies record the history of what you are looking at. For instance in an ecommerce environment, they record the things that you add to the shopping cart so they are still there when you pay for them. Couold you imagine the problems if the user had to keep adding things to the cart every time they visit a different page? The sole purpose of a session cookie is to improve the user experience
Occasionally web hosts add cookies that we have no knowledge about, so please forgive us if these make an unwarranted appearance, and please tell us if they do. We do not condone the use of unsolicited cookies.
No information provided by our visitors will be used for marketing without their express consent.
The cookie consent banner will reappear after 28 days of acceptance
Our privacy policy contains more information about your privacy and online data used by this site
Last Updated: 21/01/2025