Browser cookies are small data files stored on you computer by a website to help it to remember you and your previous activities on the site. In the past, cookies have received a bad press when a small minority of websites chose to abuse the technology to track users for longer than they should have. The vast majority, however, use cookies as a way of improving your browsing experience by remembering your preferences.
In the case of PayDayLoansOnline, for instance, we occasionally use browser cookies as a secure way of storing details of your loan applications before they are complete. This means that if you are filling out an application and get interrupted (perhaps by a power cut) you don’t have to fill it all out from the beginning when you log on again. A browser cookie stores what you have entered so far and automatically repopulates the form for you when you next access the website. For many of our users this can save them a lot of time.
We also use cookies to help us track the traffic to our website and figure out how many visitors we get, where they come from, and their technical specifications. Without getting into the boring details, cookies enable us to find out which operating systems and browsers our visitors are using so that we can optimize our site for the kinds of visitors we get. Different browsers display things differently so if a high proportion of our users switch to one particular type of browser we need to make sure that our website displays properly in that browser. This is just one of the everyday tasks our web designers have to keep up with.
They also help us figure out how long people stay on each page so that we can continue to improve those pages that our visitors find to be less useful. If there is a page which our users spend far less time on than average then we review it and make sure that it contains useful information and that the links which lead to it are accurate in their descriptions. The details we store don’t get any more personal than that, however, and when we set a cookie we always make sure it is done for the purposes of improving your browsing experience and nothing else.
The cookie files are tiny text-based files which you will be able to see in your Temporary Internet Files folder on Microsoft Windows. They take up very little space on your hard drive and are automatically deleted as soon as they are no longer useful. Other files stored by our website on your computer will include the graphical images which make up the site and other similar files. The purpose of this is to enable the website to load faster each time you browse. Overall, the key thing to remember is that our policy is to only set a cookie for you when there is a clear benefit to you.
