What is a Cookie?

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site and these pieces of information are used to improve services for you through:

• enabling a service to recognise your device so you don't have to give the same information several times during one task
• recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don't need to do it for every web page requested
• measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there's enough capacity to ensure they are fast
• analysing anonymised data to help us understand how people interact with our services so we can make them better.