One of the most common ways for websites to remember your preferences is to use cookies. These are small pieces of data that live in your browser and mean that you don’t have to repeat yourself every time you go back to a website. For example, they help search engines to remember that you want your search results in English and help online shops to remember the items that you’ve put in your shopping cart.
Advertisers can also use cookies to deliver ads that are more relevant to you.
All modern browsers have tools to help you delete or block cookies from being set. But it’s important to remember that many sites need cookies to work properly, so by deleting or blocking them, some parts of these websites might not function correctly.
An example of what can be stored in a cookie is:
A name: The cookie’s name, which is unique to the site that set it.
Site name: The name of the domain or sub-domain that set the cookie.
Expiry date: After the expiry date, the cookie will be automatically deleted. Some cookies will expire when you close your browser. These are called session cookies.
Other cookies may expire weeks, months or years after being set. These are called persistent cookies.