What cookies are
A cookie is a small text file that a website asks your browser to store and send back on later visits. Related technologies, including local storage and pixel tags, do a similar job. They let a site remember a preference, keep a session working, count visits without recognising you by name, or measure whether an advertisement was seen.
Strictly necessary cookies
These make the site work and cannot be switched off through our consent controls, because without them pages break. They include the cookie that records your cookie choices themselves, session cookies used when a member of staff signs in to publish, and security cookies used by our content delivery network to distinguish legitimate readers from automated abuse. They contain no advertising identifiers.
Preference cookies
These remember choices you make, such as dismissing a notice so that it does not reappear on every page. They are convenience features and the site works without them, though it will forget your choices each visit.
Analytics cookies
We measure how our journalism is read: which articles are opened, how readers arrive, how far down a page they get, and which pages produce errors. This information drives editorial decisions about what to cover next and technical work on performance. We configure analytics to limit cross-site tracking and to report in aggregate rather than to build individual profiles.
Advertising cookies
Where display advertising is served on this site, advertising partners may set cookies to limit how often you see the same advertisement and to measure whether a campaign was effective. These are non-essential and are only set where you have given consent. We do not share reader correspondence or email addresses with advertising partners.
Embedded content
Some articles embed material hosted elsewhere, such as a video player, a chart tool or a social media post. When you interact with embedded content, the provider may set its own cookies and receive your IP address, exactly as if you had visited that provider’s site. Their policies apply to that processing, and where a provider is known to be intrusive we prefer a static screenshot with a link.
How to control cookies
You can accept or refuse non-essential categories using the consent controls on this site, and you can change your mind at any time. Every mainstream browser also allows you to block or delete cookies, either wholesale or by site, and to browse in a private window that discards them when it closes. Blocking strictly necessary cookies may prevent parts of the site from functioning.
Many browsers now send a global privacy signal on your behalf. Where such a signal is received, we treat it as a refusal of non-essential cookies without requiring you to interact with a banner.
Changes
The specific cookies in use change as we change service providers. Rather than list individual cookie names that go stale, this policy describes the categories and the purposes, and we update it when a category changes. Questions may be sent through our contact page.