What are Cookies?

Cookies and other online tracking technologies are small bits of data or code that are used to identify your devices when you use and interact with our websites and other services. They are often used for remembering your preferences, to identify popular news stories, and remember you’re logged in, allowing you to comment on stories.

What Cookies do we use and how do we use them?

Essential cookies and similar technologies

These are vital for the running of our services on our websites and apps. Without the use of these cookies parts of our websites would not function. For example, Times+ uses cookies to help us identify which of our readers have a subscription in order to access content they are entitled to on the website. We use these cookies to tell if you’re logged in to your account, which allows extra functionality, such as making comments on stories.

Analytics cookies and similar technologies

These collect information about your use of our websites and apps, and enable us to improve the way it works. For example, analytics cookies show us which are the most frequently visited pages on The Sun or The Times websites allowing us to provide the most popular news articles further up the page. They help us record how you interact with our websites, such as how you navigate around pages and from page to page; identifying improvements we can make to the customer journey. They also help identify any difficulties you have accessing our services, so we can fix any problems. Additionally these cookies allow us to see overall patterns of usage at an aggregated level.

Functional/preference cookies and similar technologies

These cookies collect information about your choices and preferences, and allow us to remember things like language, your username (so you can log in faster), text size, and location, so we can show you relevant content to where you are. They allow us to customize the services you have accessed. We also use these cookies to provide you with services such as video clips.

Tracking, advertising cookies and similar technologies

We use these types of technologies to provide advertisements that are more relevant to your interests. This can be done by delivering online adverts based your previous web browsing activity, known as “online behavioural advertising” (OBA). Cookies are placed on your browser which will remember the websites you have visited. Advertising based on what you have been looking at is then displayed to you when you visit websites who use the same advertising networks.

For example: You may be doing online research in order to buy a bicycle, and read a number of articles about bikes on various websites. As you browse those sites a cookie from an advertising network would be placed in your browser. It would remember that you had visited several websites related to cycling. Then, when you visited another website in the same advertising network, the website could show you an advert related to cycling.

We may also use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with adverts based on your location, offers you click on, and other similar interactions with our websites and apps.

Managing cookies

Most modern browsers are set to accept cookies by default, but you can change your settings to notify you when a cookie is being set or updated, or to block cookies altogether. Please consult the “Help” section of your browser.