What is a cookie?

A cookie is a piece of information in the form of a very small text file that is placed on an internet user’s hard drive. It is generated by a web page server, which is basically the computer that operates a web site. The information the cookie contains is set by the server and it can be used by that server whenever the user visits the site. A cookie can be thought of as an internet user’s identification card, which tell a web site when the user has returned.

(Information taken from (http://www.aboutcookies.org)

How do we use cookies?

We use tools such a Google Analytics, which utilizes cookies, in order for us to be able to analyse visitor data on the Fifth Column website. We do not store any personal information about our visitors.

__utmb (expiry after 30 minutes)

Google Analytics Determining Visitor Session:

The Google Analytics tracking for ga.js uses two cookies to establish a session. If either of these two cookies are absent, further activity by the user initiates the start of a new session. See the Session article in the Help Center for a detailed definition and a list of scenarios that end a session. You can customize the length of the default session time using the _setSessionCookieTimeout() method.

This description is specific to the ga.js tracking code for web pages. If you use Analytics tracking for other environments—such as Flash or mobile—you should check the documentation for those environments to learn how sessions are calculated or established.

 __utmc (expiry at the end of session)

Google Analytics Determining Visitor Session:

The Google Analytics tracking for ga.js uses two cookies to establish a session. If either of these two cookies are absent, further activity by the user initiates the start of a new session. See the Session article in the Help Center for a detailed definition and a list of scenarios that end a session. You can customize the length of the default session time using the _setSessionCookieTimeout() method.

This description is specific to the ga.js tracking code for web pages. If you use Analytics tracking for other environments—such as Flash or mobile—you should check the documentation for those environments to learn how sessions are calculated or established.

__utma  (expiry after 2 years)

Google Analytics Identifying Unique Visitors:

Each unique browser that visits a page on your site is provided with a unique ID via the __utma cookie. In this way, subsequent visits to your website via the same browser are recorded as belonging to the same (unique) visitor. Thus, if a person interacted with your website using both Firefox and Internet Explorer, the Analytics reports would track this activity under two unique visitors. Similarly if the same browser were used by two different visitors, but with a separate computer account for each, the activity would be recorded under two unique visitor IDs. On the other hand, if the browser happens to be used by two different people sharing the same computer account, one unique visitor ID is recorded, even though two unique individuals accessed the site.

__utmz  (expiry after 1 years)

Google Analytics Tracking Traffic Sources & Navigation:

When visitors reach your site via a search engine result, a direct link, or an ad that links to your page, Google Analytics stores the type of referral information in a cookie. The parameters in the cookie value string are parsed and sent in the GIF Request (in the utmcc variable). The expiration date for the cookie is set as 6 months into the future. This cookie gets updated with each subsequent page view to your site; thus it is used to determine visitor navigation within your site.

__atuvc (expiry after 2 years)

AddThis:

The __atuvc cookie is created and read by the AddThis social sharing site JavaScript on the client side in order to make sure the user sees the updated count if they share a page and return to it before our share count cache is updated. No data from that cookie is sent back to AddThis and removing it when disabling cookies would cause unexpected behavior for users.