Cookie Information

What are cookies?

A 'cookie' is a small text file that is stored on your computer or mobile device when you visit some websites. Cookies do lots of different jobs, such as letting you navigate between pages efficiently, remembering your preferences, and improving your experience of our website. They can’t harm your computer.

How we use cookies

The University of Sussex makes limited use of cookies while you are browsing the website. We generally only use session-based cookies, which are deleted when you close your browser. Our cookies are anonymous, containing no information that can identify you personally.

We do use some third-party widgets on the site, such as Google Analytics, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. These widgets may set cookies and we are working towards identifying what each of them set. However, the cookie information from each of these sites is usually anonymous, unless you are logged in to those third-party systems while you are on our site.

By using this website, you consent to the storing of the cookies listed below. We may also use some cookies that are not listed – these will contain no personal information about you. You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser, although this means you might not be able to use the full functionality of our website.

Information about how cookies can be controlled within the various browsers:

You can find more information about cookies with the following resources:

We want you to be confident about your privacy when using our website, so if you have any questions that aren’t answered here, please contact webteam@sussex.ac.uk

What cookies do we use?

University of Sussex

There may be a number of cookies set via our website, depending on what part of our system you log in to. All of the following are considered essential cookies for the operation of the website and services you log in to (such as the WCM and Study Direct):

Name Life Purpose
PHPSESSID session Used by PHP to store the session ID (e.g. for Sussex Direct login)
UUcm session Facilitate logging in to and using the WCM
BroadcastUS session Facilitate logging in to and using Broadcast
SPLASH session Facilitate logging in to and using SPLASH
PastExamPaperSearchSID session Provides access to the Past Exam Papers search facility
StudentdirectorySID session Provides access to the Student Directory lookup
MOODLEID_studydirect session To facilitate logging in to and using Study Direct
MoodleSessionTeststudydirect session To facilitate logging in to and using Study Direct
MoodleSessionstudydirect session To facilitate logging in to and using Study Direct

Areas of the website that require you to authenticate via LDAP may set cookies with randomly generated names, such as:

  • $1$6HXuntt/$PjruwlVOlUTAyWO6Mayoj/
  • Si9KFXjybGul_

Google Analytics

This website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc.

Google Analytics uses cookies to help analyse how the website is used. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for us and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage. Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google's behalf.

Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google.

Name Life Purpose
__utmz 182 days Stores where a visitor came from (search engine, search keyword, link)
__utma 730 days Stores each user's amount of visits, and the time of the first visit, the previous visit, and the current visit (presumably partly for double checking of this information).
__utmb less than a day Used to check approximately how long you stay on a site: when a visit starts, and approximately ends
__utmc session based Same as __utmb
__utmv 730 days Used for user-custom variables in Analytics

Further information about Google products and cookies:

Twitter

Parts of this website use Twitter feeds, a micro-blogging platform by Twitter, Inc.

Twitter widgets may add third-party cookies - those not set directly by our site - to help analyis usage and remember your session if you are also logged in to the Twitter service. To that end, Twitter widgets may set all of the cookies that Google Analytics set (above) and also:

Name Life Purpose
_twitter_sess session Remember your logged in Twitter session

Further information:

YouTube

Parts of this website contain embedded videos from YouTube. Where possible, we've set this to use YouTube's 'nocookie' domain so that it will not store any cookies. However, due to the different editors for the various sections of the overall University of Sussex website it's not always possible to guarantee that cookies will not be set.

Further information:

Flickr

The code provided by Flickr to include various images and galleries may by default set cookies.

Further information: