The 'cookie law' was passed by the European Union last year, but the UK government allowed an extra year's grace before treating it as law here. That period of grace ceased at the end of May 2012.
The new law affects millions of websites across the EU. To find out how it affects yours, read on.
A cookie is a small text file that a website can store on your computer to help keep track of a variety of things, for example if you want to stay logged into a website, or your preferences within a website.
You can learn more about all the cookies we use below:
If the settings on your browser are adjusted to accept cookies, we take this (and your continued use of our website) to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.
We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn't working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called 'Analytics' programs also tell us if , on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before, and help us to develop our services to you. We use Google Analytics for these features.
You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so, however, will limit the functionality of our website (and a large proportion of the world's websites) as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.
It may be that your concerns about cookies relate to so-called 'spyware'. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser, you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive.