Cookies

1

What the word covers

A cookie is a small named file that a website asks a browser to keep and to hand back on the next visit. Other kinds of browser storage do much the same job under different names, and a reader controls all of them from the same place, so this sheet treats them together.

Five kinds are worth telling apart, because what a reader loses by blocking one is not what they lose by blocking another. A notice that lumps them together, agrees to everything and calls it a preference is doing the reader no favours.

2

The kinds, and what each is for

Strictly necessary files come first. They hold a session together, they carry security tokens, and they remember what a reader answered when the consent notice appeared. Block that last one and the notice returns on every visit, which is the odd case where refusing a file makes a site more annoying rather than more private.

Preference files are the second kind. They remember a choice a reader made, such as a notice dismissed or a setting changed, and they do nothing else.

Measurement is the third. It counts pages opened and records which page sent a reader onward, added up across everybody rather than followed person by person. A publisher learns from it which pages get read at all, which is the whole of its purpose here.

Attribution comes fourth, and it is the kind that pays for the research. A file records that a visit arrived from here, so that a commission can be matched to it later. What that commission does and does not buy is spelled out on How this sheet is paid.

The fifth kind is not this site’s at all. Once a reader has arrived at an operator, that operator sets whatever it sets, under its own notice. Privacy explains where the handover happens, and why it carries more weight on the offshore side than it would elsewhere.

3

No names, no durations, and the list that is never stale

No vendor is named on this sheet, no durations are printed, and the reason is the same reason the privacy sheet gives. A duration written into prose is a guess the moment anything changes, and a list of suppliers goes stale faster than a page gets rewritten. A reader who trusts a stale list has been misled by a page that looked thorough.

There is a list that is never stale, and it is already on the reader’s own machine. Every browser can show the files stored against a site, with their names and their expiry dates, and that display is current by definition in a way a published list cannot be. Open it on this site, read the names, and what is actually there is what the browser says is there.

4

How to refuse them

Control sits in the browser’s settings for site data, and four actions are available in every mainstream browser. Block everything. Block only what a third party sets. Clear the lot on closing the window. Or clear one site’s files now and leave the rest alone.

A private window is the quick version of the same thing, discarding what it collected when it closes. Per-site exceptions are the precise version: allow what a reader wants and refuse the rest. Neither needs any permission from a publisher, which is why a browser setting beats a consent notice every time.

Two consequences are worth knowing before a reader clears everything. Clearing wipes the record of the reader’s own choices along with everything else, so the consent notice comes back and so does any setting they had picked. And nothing on this site needs a file of any kind in order to be read. Block the whole lot and the arithmetic still works, the figures still show, and the sheets still say what they said.

The assumptions behind those figures are listed on Terms of use, and the method that turns them into a total is on How a receipt is struck. Neither needs a file to be understood.