A cookie is a small amount of data sent to your computer or mobile phone from a website. This means the website can recognise your device (your computer or mobile phone) if you return to the same site
A cookie often includes a unique identifier, which is a randomly generated number. This is stored on your device's hard drive. Many cookies are automatically deleted after you finish using a website. Cookies are not programs and do not collect information from your device.
Cookies make your experience of using websites faster and easier. They allow websites to create a customised view of pages to which you navigate. For example, they are commonly used to authenticate or identify registered users of a website without requiring them to sign in each time they access it. Other uses include maintaining a ‘shopping basket’ of goods a user has chosen to purchase, site personalisation (presenting different pages to different users) and tracking the pages a user has visited on a site for analysis purposes.
Cookies may come with or without an expiry date. Cookies without an expiry date exist until the browser is closed, while cookies with an expiry date may be stored by the device until the expiry date passes.
You can restrict or block cookies set by the Register but this will limit the functionality of the Register by preventing you from logging in to your account. You will still be able to view other data that we publish on the site. The Register makes use of ‘tracking‘ cookies from the Google Analytics service also, but no other third part cookies are used. More information on Google Analytics is available below.
Cookies are sent to your browser (whether you use Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari or any other browser) by a website and then stored in the cookies directory of your device.
To check and update your cookies settings, you will need to know what browser you are using and what version of it you have. You can usually find this out by opening the browser (just as though you were going to use the internet) and then clicking on 'Help' and then 'About'. This will give you information about the browser version you are using. To find out how to allow, block, delete and manage the cookies on all standard web browsers, go to www.aboutcookies.org and select the browser and version you are using. You'll also find information about how to delete cookies from your computer.
If you use a mobile phone to access the Register or other sites that use cookies, please refer to your handset manual for guidance.
The Register site uses cookies to remember the login details of registered users. The cookie stores a session ID and user ID to enable a persistent login state. The Register does not use cookies for any other purpose at this time.
The Register website uses Google Analytics cookies to determine unique visitors to the site, calculate average time spent on the website by users and determine how the website was reached (i.e. via search engine or direct link).
This information gives us insight into where we could improve our website such as navigation and user experience.
Our analytics tracker does not store or process the full IP address of users, so we only get a rough location of where our users are accessing our site from.
More details about cookies used by Google Analytics are published on the Google website. Cookies and Google Analytics
Google also publishes a browser add-on that will stop cookie information for Google Analytics being stored. Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on