How Are Cookies Utilized Across Our Research Platform?
A plain-language account of the cookies our platform sets, why they exist, and how you keep control of them.
Last updated: 12 June 2024
About Cookies
A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to store. The next time you visit, that file gets sent back, which is how the site recognises your session or remembers a preference you set earlier. There is nothing exotic about the mechanism — as noted in industry reports, it has been part of the web since the mid-1990s.
Two lifetimes matter here. Session cookies live only as long as your browser tab stays open; close it and they vanish. Persistent cookies stick around for a defined period, sometimes minutes, sometimes months, until they expire or you clear them yourself. We use both, and the sections below explain which falls into which category.
Cookies We Use
Most of what we set is unglamorous and necessary.
Essential
These keep the platform working. They hold your login session, remember your cookie consent choice, and protect form submissions. Disable them and core features — including the consent banner itself — stop behaving predictably.
Analytics
We use these to understand which research pages get read, where visitors drop off, and how quickly pages load. The data informs editorial decisions rather than identifying you personally.
Advertising
We do not currently serve personalised advertising. We are reserving this category in case future content partnerships call for it, and we will ask for consent before any such cookie is set.
That last point is worth stressing. The advertising category is documented because it may apply later, not because it applies today.
Third-Party Cookies
Some cookies are set by services we rely on rather than by us directly. Our content delivery network (CDN) uses cookies to route requests efficiently and to keep pages loading quickly across regions — this is the only third-party category active right now.
Two further categories are planned but not yet live. Should we integrate an external analytics provider, it would place its own cookies subject to that provider's policy. The same applies to any advertising network we might work with. When either moves from planned to active, this page changes first, and the consent options change with it.
A practical note: third-party cookies are increasingly restricted by browsers themselves. Even where we describe a future provider, your browser's own defaults may block it before our consent layer ever applies.
Controlling Cookies
You hold the final say. Every major browser lets you view stored cookies, delete them, and block new ones — either across the board or site by site. The settings usually sit under privacy or security menus, and your browser's help documentation is the most reliable guide since the exact path shifts between versions.
Opting out has consequences worth understanding before you do it. Block essential cookies and you may not stay logged in, or your consent preference may reset on every visit. Block analytics cookies and the site works normally; you simply stop contributing to the usage data that shapes what we publish. The trade-off differs by category, so blanket blocking is rarely the most useful choice.
Policy Changes
This policy will change as the platform does — particularly when the analytics and advertising categories described above move from planned to active. The revision date at the top of this page always reflects the most recent edit.
When a change is material, we surface it through the consent banner rather than expecting you to re-read the page on your own. Questions about any of this belong on our Contact page, and the broader handling of your data is covered in our Privacy Policy.