As you’ve been browsing the web recently you might have noticed small changes to some organisation’s homepages or to other sections of their sites.

You may find that sites are directing you more obviously to their privacy policies, even introducing a policy at all – or more obviously, incorporating a pop-up information box referring to ‘cookies’.

So what’s it all about? The EU issued a privacy directive regarding how personal data is collected and the control of how it is used, and this is now in effect for UK websites. Many websites load a ‘cookie’ – a few lines of code – onto the user’s computer in order to personalise their browsing experience. You might see this as a ‘Hello again’ message on a website, or as remembered goods in an online basket.

The effect of the EU directive is that users should now be informed when a cookie is being collected, why that cookie is there and when that cookie is being used.

In the majority of cases cookies are nothing to fear – they enhance your online experience and are more commonly associated with being able to provide general reports about what pages of a website are popular or searched for most often – these are called analytics.

You have probably noticed we’ve introduced our own cookie policy. When you land on our site please take a moment to read through it.

And by the way, cookies are a very different thing from viruses – which are malicious programs designed to affect your normal computer operations. These are often accidentally downloaded to a computer through the user clicking on a link or email attachment. Our advice is, don’t click on a link or any attachment if you don’t trust the source. And make sure you install good antivirus software such as Kaspersky and make sure it’s kept up to date.

We can help if you have questions on any of the above – just get in touch!