Yavapai College Cookie Usage

Cookies - An Overview

A cookie is a small amount of data that may be written onto your hard drive when you visit a web site. It identifies you as a previous visitor of the site and is most often used to personalize settings and provide for custom user preferences.

In addition to storing preferences and personalized settings, Cookies are used by web sites to determine which sections and files are visited most often. Web sites that require a username and password (such as Hotmail or Yahoo!) also use cookies to "remember" visitors. Each web site deploys a unique cookie for every visitor, so one cookie cannot be "read" by another web site.

There are two main types of cookies:

• Per-session
• Persistent

Per-Session cookies are almost always anonymous and only exist on your machine until you close your web browser. They are most often used to increase the performance of web-based applications and to reduce the amount of data that must be transferred between your computer and the web server. They typically will store a session ID or some unique identifier that can be used while you are browsing a specific web site.

Persistent cookies can represent a privacy risk, as they exist after you shut down your web browser. Persistent cookies are often used to store your preferences when you visit a website, and can sometimes be used to store usernames and passwords to access some web sites (although this is uncommon as it is potentially a security risk).

Yavapai College's Use of Cookies

Yavapai College has multiple web sites and multiple web-based applications. Each site and application may have a different cookie policy. Every reasonable effort will be made to highlight those specific policies and requirements within this document.

Cookies are not required for normal access to the YC web site and web-based applications at this time. Some applications in the testing and development stages may require cookies, but these are probably not open to the general public.

While our main web site and supported web applications do not require cookies, you may be prompted that our site is trying to place a cookie on your local machine. These cookies are typically per-session cookies and will be deleted as soon as you close your web browser. These cookies maintain state information that allows our web servers to use the minimum bandwidth necessary to provide content to you.

To better serve our students, faculty, staff, and the community, we are beginning to use persistent cookies to track usage statistics on our web sites. This enables us to highlight important content and update or remove old or unused content. We would ask that you allow this cookie to be stored on your machine, as it has no personally-identifiable information and allows us to better serve you.

Cookie Usage by Site:

If you have any questions regarding Yavapai College's use of cookies, or cookies in general, please contact our Web Services team using the link at the bottom of this page.