What are cookies?
Cookies are the confusingly adorably named tiny text files that can be placed on your computer or mobile device that uniquely (but anonymously) identify your browser or device. They are unable to search your computer in any way, cannot introduce viruses to your computer and contain no personal identifying information about you (basically they are nothing to be afraid of).
What are cookies used for?
Cookies are used by sites or services when they wants to know if your computer or device has visited that site or service before. These cookies on your computer or device can then be used to help remember your preferences (such as language), help you navigate between pages efficiently, and generally improve your browsing experience.
Similarly cookies are used by web publishers to help understand how their site or service is being used. Services such as Google Analytics use cookies to provide anonymous aggregated data such as how long users in general spent on the site, how many pages they visited and in which order etc.
Cookies can also be used for online advertising – by aggregating the very basic information cookies gather, informed guesses can be made about your demographic and ads targeted to you thusly. Or more simply – if you go to a site about watches, it may drop a cookie on your computer, so the next sites you go to will then contain ads about watches.
What types of cookies does The Online Advertising Guide use?
There are generally four categories of cookies: “Strictly Necessary,” “Performance,” “Functionality,” and “Targeting.” The Online Advertising Guide routinely uses three of these types of cookie: “Strictly Necessary,” “Performance,” and “Targeting.”
Here is some information about each cookie category:
How long will cookies stay on my device?
The amount of time a cookie stays on your device is variable: the majority of cookies expire after the end of your browsing session– others persist for longer. In online advertising you can generally expect most advertising cookies to last about one month at most (although again it varies).
First and third party cookies
First-party cookies are cookies that belong to The Online Advertising Guide, third-party cookies are cookies that another party places on your device through our site. Third-party cookies may be placed on your device by someone providing a service for The Online Advertising Guide, for example to help us understand how our service is being used. Third-party cookies may also be placed on your device by our business partners so that they can use them to advertise products and services to you elsewhere on the Internet.