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Cookies for SouthamptonCityCouncil

Information about the cookies we use to assist you when using the website and improve your user experience.

What are cookies?

A cookie is a piece of information in the form of a small text file that is generated and set by our website and placed on your computer’s hard drive.

Cookies make your interaction with our website faster and easier. Without cookies, it would be very difficult for our website to remember your preferences or registration details between each web page you use and between each time you visit the site.

They are not computer programs, and they can't be executed as code. Cookies cannot access any information on your computer - so a cookie cannot read any other information saved there such as your email address for example. We do not use cookies for identifying shopping habits or targeting advertising.

We use cookies mainly because they save your time and make your browsing experience more efficient and enjoyable. Without cookies you will have to reset your preferences on each page you visit.

To find out more information about cookies generally, visit All About Cookies.

Cookies on our website

Our website session by default uses a cookie to store session ID. Session ID is a unique string, used to recognise individual visitor between visits. But, if client's web browser doesn't support cookies or visitor has disabled cookies in web browser's settings, our website can't store session id on client's machine. In this case, new session will be created for every request. This behaviour is useless because we can't remember information for certain visitor between two requests. We can say that, by default, sessions can't work if browser doesn't support cookies.

  • Session Cookie

    A session cookie stores your browsing information and is active until you leave the site and close your browser after which it is deleted.

  • _cfduid Cookie for identifying individual visitors privately

    The _cfduid cookie helps Cloudflare detect malicious visitors to our Customers’ websites and minimises blocking legitimate users. It may be placed on the devices of our customers' End Users to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. It is necessary for supporting Cloudflare's security features.

    Privacy and the _cfduid cookie

    The _cfduid cookie collects and anonymises End User IP addresses using a one-way hash of certain values so they cannot be personally identified. The cookie is a session cookie that expires after 30 days. The _cfduid cookie does not:

    • Allow for cross-site tracking,
    • Follow users from site to site by merging various _cfduid identifiers into a profile or
    • Correspond to any user ID in a Customer’s web application.

    Generally, Cloudflare keeps user-level data (including the IP address of a requester) for less than 24 hours. There may be exceptions with IP addresses that have triggered security alerts. You can find more information about what Cloudflare logs in this blog post.

    Cookie data is processed in Cloudflare's data centre in the United States and is subject to the cross-border data transfer section (section 7) of the Cloudflare Privacy Policy.