Glossary
Foviance's glossary contains definitions and explanations of many of the terms related to user experience, usability, accessibility and analytics.
Cookies
Web ‘Cookies’ are small text files that are placed on a user’s computer or mobile phone by a website; they are stored there by the browser for varying length of time (from a session to permanently). Users can control their cookie settings in their Web browsers or mobile phones privacy options. Each web domain can only access cookies it stored eg bbc.co.uk can only read cookies bbc.co.uk placed on your computer. 1st party cookies are those placed by the site the user is visiting, for example, theindependent.co.uk; 3rd party cookies which are those placed by advertisers whose ads the user sees on the Independent’s website.
Cookies have a variety of uses:
- Analytics – to gather statistics on web usage in aggregate form.
- Session and site specific – to authenticate users at sign in, store site preferences, hold shopping cart contents and so on; as such most large sites use them, and they do tend to improve the user experience by making it more seamless: one-click buying or quick check-out, not having to log in every time you visit and so on.
- Marketing – to show users relevant, targeted content (using geolocation cookies to determine whether you are in the UK or US for instance) and adverts
- Advertising – to track ad impressions for advertisers
Cookies do not collect personally identifiable data/information (PID/PII) though through their use, companies may be able to infer relatively detailed profiles from users.
Cookies come in different flavours:
- Classic HTML cookies, which can be managed by changing privacy settings in a Web browser;
- Lesser known Flash cookies, which are stored in a separate directory that many users are unaware of and may not even know how to control. In fact, Flash cookies can be used to restore HTML cookies that have been deleted from a user’s computer, circumventing a user’s privacy settings – According to UC Berkeley researchers more than half of the internet’s top websites (including Google’s DoubleClick subsidiary) use these, but only four of them mention it in their privacy policies all of which has now led to some lawsuits (2010) in the US.