What is a cookie?
A cookie is a harmless text file that is stored in your browser when you visit almost any web page. The usefulness of the cookie is that the website is able to remember your visit when you return to browse that page. Although many people do not know, cookies have been used for 20 years, when the first browsers for the World Wide Web appeared.
What is NOT a cookie?
It is not a virus, or a Trojan, or a worm, or spam, or spyware, or open windows pop-up.
What information does a cookie store?
Cookies usually do not store sensitive information about you, such as credit cards or bank details, photographs, your ID or personal information, etc. The data they keep are of a technical nature, personal preferences, personalization of contents, etc.
The web server does not associate you as a person, but your web browser. In fact, if you regularly browse Internet Explorer and try to navigate through the same website with Firefox or Chrome you will see that the web does not realize that you are the same person because it is really associating the browser, not the person.
What kind of cookies are there?
Technical cookies: These are the most basic and allow, among other things, to know when a human or an automated application is browsing, when an anonymous and registered user navigates, basic tasks for the operation of any dynamic web.
Analysis cookies: They collect information about the type of navigation you are doing, the sections you use most, products consulted, time zone of use, language, etc.
Advertising cookies: Display advertising based on your browsing, country of origin, language, etc.
What are own and third party cookies?
Own cookies are those generated by the page you are visiting and those of third parties are those generated by external services or providers such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.
What happens if I disable cookies?
To understand the scope that can have disable cookies we show some examples:
To remove cookies from a website you must go to the configuration of your browser and there you can search the associated to the domain in question and proceed to its removal.
Setting cookies for the most popular browsers
Here's how to access a specific cookie from the Chrome browser. Note: these steps may vary depending on the browser version:
To access the cookie settings of the Internet Explorer browser follow these steps (may vary depending on the version of the browser):
To access the cookie settings of the Firefox browser follow these steps (may vary depending on the browser version):
To access the cookies configuration of the Safari browser for OSX follow these steps (may vary depending on the version of the browser):
To access the cookies configuration of the Safari browser for iOS follow these steps (may vary depending on the browser version):
To access the browser cookie settings for Android devices follow these steps (may vary depending on the browser version):
To access the browser cookie settings for Windows Phone devices follow these steps (may vary depending on the browser version):