Cookie Notice

A cookie is simply a reminder. It is a way for a website to “remember” activity or input previously engaged in by a user’s browser. By its nature, the web is stateless, meaning that anything recorded or learned at a given time on a given page is not saved or available to subsequent pages or interactions. This means that, for instance, putting an item in your shopping cart would be lost to a subsequent check out page without a reminder of what went into the cart. On the web, this function, known as state, is achieved through cookies. Cookies are not mysterious. They are nothing more than a text file which holds data in the form of a name and value, e.g. “CART_CONTAINS = ITEM_SKU_123456” or “QUANTITY = 1”. A website asks your browser to save these values and then resend them to the website on subsequent page visits.

Cookies used in advertising work the same way, in that they are simply a name and a value, but they are used to remember different things. For instance, an advertising cookie might look like PSEUDONYM=ABC123. By saving a single unique value the advertiser can use the value to remember more things like: how many times ABC123 saw a given ad or what type of content interests ABC123 so more relevant advertising can be shown or interactions with the ads measured.

Cookies are often subcategorized as 1^st or 3^rd party. In general, a first party cookie is a cookie from the domain (website) that you see in your URL bar, while third party cookies are cookies issued from third party content on the website. Advertising cookies typically appear in a 3^rd party context. Some browsers have additional restrictions for cookies appearing in 3^rd party contexts.