Cookies are integral to the way modern websites work. Most personalisation and social media integration on websites relies on cookies in one way or another.

However they can be used in a way that doesn’t benefit visitors, and they are often used to track people across the web, and build up profiles that are very valuable to brands and advertisers for targeted marketing.

This is often seen as an invasion of privacy, and because cookies are a fairly quiet technology – this can be happening to you without you realising it, or being able to stop it if you wanted to.

To help you become more aware of this activity, and give you a say in whether you want to allow it to happen, new EU-wide privacy legislation was put in place in 2011. This has become known as the Cookie Law.

The Cookie Law requires that websites give you clear, detailed information about how they use cookies, and provide ways for you to signal whether or not you want to allow such use. The website is then required by law to respect your wishes. This might mean they block the cookies you don’t like, or they don’t let you access the site – however you should expect to be given the choice.

Some websites will allow you to choose which types of cookies to allow or block, although in some cases if you do this you may not be able to use or see all of a website.

If a website you visit is not giving you sufficient information or choice, and the company that owns it is based in the EU, then it may be breaking the law, and you can take action against the owner.

This website has been created to help people understand better what cookies are and how they are used by different websites. You can use it to look up your favourite websites, and soon you will be able to search for information about specific cookies to understand what they are used for.