What is a cookie?

A cookie is a small text file stored on your computer by your web browser. It contains information sent to your computer by websites that you visit, so that later on they can read it back again.

Should I be worried by them?

Normally, no. Usually they are just used by that one website to help you – that could be to remember the settings you have ticked, remember the contents of your shopping basket or to provide you with the most relevant information.

Most cookies you will find are “first party” – these are set by the website you are visiting and only read by that site. For example, many sites use Google Analytics to see which of their pages are the most popular and which of their visitors are new or returning. This doesn’t mean the website are giving away any secrets about you to Google, it’s just helping the website provide the content that their visitors find the most interesting.

What do you use them for?

Here at Dear Geek we use cookies for 3 purposes, none of which are evil!

1) We use Google Analytics to see what articles are the most popular and how people find us, so we can do more of what you want to see.

2) We use some social ‘plugins’ that help people share content on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ – we don’t get any information back from these sites and they will only share posts if you click the buttons. Your secrets are safe!

3) On the “Things the Geek loves” pages, and in some blog posts, we link to products we like and recommend. Some of these links are “affiliate” links – this means that if you buy something we will get a small reward. This doesn’t make what you buy more expensive, and we don’t know who buys what, it just helps us cover a tiny part of the costs of running this site. Again, no private information is shared, your secrets are safe.

They why do I have to opt in and not out?

For the reasons above we would really like you to opt in to our cookies – it helps us and it will improve the site for you.

European laws on privacy demand that visitors are not forced to accept cookies, and we have nothing to hide, so we are nice and transparent about asking you to opt in.