What Is an Electronic Cookie?

An Electronic Cookie, sometimes called a Website Cookie, an HTTP Cookie or just plain Cookie, is a small piece of data stored by your browser when you visit a website. These bits of data allow websites to perform a number of tasks including analysing traffic (to help determine which pages are most popular, etc) and recording your preferences for the next time you visit. All-in-all, they are there to help the website give you a more personal experience.

Are Cookies Good or Bad?

Like most useful things in life, there can be a darker side too. These range from the innocuous – like tracking your activity to serve you targeted adverts (from which the website owners get a payment if you click through) to the more sinister – like spying on which websites you visit.

Growing concerns over cookie usage and their implication to privacy has given rise to Electronic Cookies being included in recent EU Legislation. You can view more details on the UK Information Commissioner’s Office website.

All that said, depending on your web activity, for the majority of time, cookies are a good thing and help give you a better web browsing experience.

How We Use Electronic Cookies

St Mary’s only use anonymous traffic logging cookies – helping us make our website more useful and easy-to-use for our visitors and customers.

The Cookies we use in no way gives us access to your computer or any personal information about you.

The Electronic Cookies We Use

Our website sets cookies using a third party service – Universal Analytics – a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. (Google). The anonymous information generated by your visit is transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. Google uses this information to evaluate the use of our site, compiling reports on our website’s activity and providing other services relating to site activity and internet usage.

The table below shows each of the Electronic Cookies we set, together with their details.

Opting-Out of Cookies On Our Site

If you want to opt-out of Cookies on our site, please click the button below.

By clicking this button a single cookie named __optout will be set and all other cookies used by our site will be disabled. This cookie is required to remember your preference.

Opt-out of Cookies
Already opted-out, click to opt back in

Controlling Cookies From All Websites

Greater, more fine-grained control of all website Cookies is available via the settings of all major web browsers. Below is a list of links to the official browser pages to help you view and set your individual Cookie Policy/filters.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The sledgehammer approach to Cookie control – i.e. disabling ALL Cookies – may, initially, seem appealing. However, please note that some web based applications, such as internet banking, require encrypted Cookies to be set for their services to work.

• Mozilla Firefox

  Cookies and Cookie settings in Firefox

• Google Chrome

  Manage your Cookies and site data in Google Chrome

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 9

  Change Internet Explorer 9 privacy settings

• Apple iOS Safari

  Safari web settings

• Apple OSX Safari 6

  Manage Cookies for Safari 6 on OSX

• Opera

  Security and privacy in Opera