Cookies
In common with most websites, the University of Surrey site makes use of cookies, which are small text files stored on your computer.
We use the information stored in these files primarily to help us understand how people use our sites and to enable us to make improvements.
In some instances, such as our online store, cookies are used to help us provide a service, such as ensuring that we can keep track of items that have been added to the shopping basket.
We also use third-party services such as YouTube for video, as well as Facebook ‘like’ buttons and Twitter ‘tweet this’ buttons. These services often store their own cookies.
We do not use cookies to store personal information, nor do we use them to identify individuals.
Cookies we use
Usage tracking
We use Google Analytics across all of our websites to help us analyse how our sites are being used. Google Analytics provides information such as how many users have visited a certain page, how long they stayed on the page, whether they were first-time or repeat visitors, what type of browsers are used and much more besides. None of this information enables us to identify individuals, and no sensitive information is stored.
The table below shows typical cookies used by Google Analytics on our websites.
| Cookie name | Purpose |
|---|---|
| __utma | Used to determine unique visitors by Google Analytics |
| __utmb | Used to maintain session for Google Analytics |
| __utmc | Used to maintain session for Google Analytics |
| __utmz | Used by Google Analytics to track referrals and search engine results |
| __utmv | Used by Google Analytics to track custom variables |
Forever Surrey, our Alumni website
The Forever Surrey website – www.surrey.ac.uk/alumni - uses some cookies to provide essential functions such as remembering whether users are logged in.
Online store
Our online store – store.surrey.ac.uk – uses cookies to store which items are in the shopping basket.
Oracle Portal
Some of our web pages are maintained using the Oracle Portal content management system. This uses two cookies to determine whether users are currently logged on and to perform some other essential functions. They are deleted when the user leaves the site.
Social bookmarking and sharing
We like to provide users with the opportunity to bookmark or share interesting content that they find on our websites. We do this using third-party tools such as AddThis (the world’s largest content sharing platform), Facebook and Twitter. All of these services make use of cookies in order to provide their functionality.
AddThis
The AddThis social bookmarking service uses the following cookies: uid, uvc, uit, psc, di, dt, uid, uit, psc, siteaud, ana_svc, Coyote-2-a0f0083.
The Facebook Like button uses the following cookies: datr, lu, locale.
The Twitter Tweet This button uses the following cookies: guest_id, twll, __utma, __utmb, __utmz, k, external_referer, js
TweetMeme
On our blogs – www.uniofsurreyblogs.org.uk – we use the TweetMeme service, which allows users to tweet articles and displays how many times an article has been tweeted. This service uses the cookie: user_unique_ident
YouTube Video
We make extensive use of YouTube to provide video content via our website. YouTube uses the following cookies: VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE, use_hitbox, PREF, VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE, demographics, HSID, SSID, LOGIN_INFO, SID, watched_video_id_list_4GNn_.
Further information
If you'd like to find out more about cookies, visit AboutCookies.org, which provides instructions on how to prevent and remove cookies.