What is a cookie ?
Cookies are small text files that are used to communicate with your computer while you are browsing a site. They are created every time you load a browser, and are retrieved with each visit to a web page. These cookies are used to provide information about you, such as your geographical location and whether or not you have been to a website before. They are most often used to improve and personalize your browsing experience.
Not all cookies are the same; different types perform different functions, and some sites contain more than others. When using www.theecologist.org, there are three types of cookies you should be aware of.
Innocuous ID Cookie
This is a cookie that is placed when you log into our site. This allows the site to remember who you are so that you can move from page to page without being signed out of the system. This cookie will only be set if you register with our site or become a subscriber.
Advertising Cookies
The Ecologist works with third parties to deliver targeted behavioral advertising. Through the use of these cookies, anonymous information about how you use other websites as well as our own will be used to place adverts about goods and services that are of interest to you. These cookies collect information for the third parties, not the Ecologist.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is used to track the visitors of a site anonymously, meaning that none of this data is linked to you specifically. Google Analytics helps us to know the number of people who visit our site, what articles they read and where they are located in the world. This information is used internally to track the performance of articles and the sections on our site. It tells us how often you visit the website, how you use it and the route you used to arrive at it, for example whether you followed a linked on Facebook or did a Google search. There are three cookies set by Google Analytics, ‘__utma’ , ‘__utmb’, ‘__utmz’, that collect this data. To understand more about Google analytics follow this link: https://developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/gaConceptsCookies#cookiesSet
For more information on cookies and how you can block them from being used on your computer, visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org/