When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. food.gov.uk puts small files (known as ‘cookies’) onto your computer to collect information about how you browse the site.
Cookies are used to:
- measure how you use the website so it can be updated and improved based on your needs
- remember the notifications you’ve seen so that we don’t show them to you again
Cookies on i83.co.uk aren’t used to identify you personally.
Measuring website usage (Google Analytics)
We use Google Analytics software to collect information about how you use food.gov.uk. We do this to help make sure the site is meeting the needs of its users and to help us make improvements.
Google Analytics stores information about:
- the pages you visit
- how long you spend on each page
- how you got to the site
- what you click on while you’re visiting the site
We don’t allow Google to use or share our analytics data.
Universal Analytics
Name: _ga
Purpose: This helps us count how many people visit food.gov.uk by tracking if you’ve visited before
Expires: 2 years
Name: _gid
Purpose: This helps us count how many people visit food.gov.uk by tracking if you’ve visited before
Expires: 2 years
Name: _gat
Purpose: Used to manage the rate at which page view requests are made
Expires: 10 minutes
Google Analytics
Name: _utma
Purpose: Like _ga, this lets us know if you’ve visited before, so we can count how many of our visitors are new to food.gov.uk or to a certain page
Expires: 2 years
Name: _utmb
Purpose: This works with _utmc to calculate the average length of time you spend on food.gov.uk
Expires: 30 minutes
Name: _utmc
Purpose: This works with _utmb to calculate when you close your browser
Expires: when you close your browser
Cloudflare
Name: __cfduid
Purpose: Set by the CloudFlare to identify trusted web traffic. It does not correspond to any user id in the web application, nor does the cookie store any personally identifiable information.
Expires: 5 years
Further details on cookies set by Cloudflare.
How to control and delete cookies
You can prevent the setting of cookies by adjusting the settings on your browser. To find out how to do this, see the “Help” section in your browser, or learn more about cookies and how to manage them on a wide variety of browsers at http://www.aboutcookies.org.