10 Oct 2022

Our cookie policy and your preferences

How Which? uses cookies and what they are. You can understand more and change your cookies preferences here.

In this article

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to understand and control your online privacy. So here is a clear explanation of what cookies are, how we use them, and how you can manage your preferences when you visit our websites.

What are cookies?

A cookie is a tiny text file placed on your computer, tablet or mobile phone by websites that you visit. Cookies store or retrieve information on your browser, which might be about you, your preferences or your device but does not usually directly identify you.

Cookies do lots of useful jobs. They help make websites work smoothly, provide information about how people browse, and make sure any adverts you see are as relevant as possible.

What we use cookies for

Our websites use three kinds of cookies:

Essential. Some cookies are essential for our website to function and to keep it safe and secure. These cannot be switched off in our systems. They let you do things like log in, move from page to page, and use our interactive tools. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not then work.
Functional & Performance. These cookies provide enhanced functionality and personalisation, and allow us to run analytics and testing tools. They measure and improve how our website performs, and give us feedback so that we can provide the best experience possible. For example, some analytics cookies allow us to count the number of visitors to our website and assess what content is most popular. Other functional and performance cookies allow us to remember any preferences you have set, and test new online tools for users.
Advertising & Marketing. We never show adverts from third parties on our website. However, we do advertise our own products and services, and you may see our adverts around the internet too. Some cookies are set by our advertising partners, used to build a profile of your interests, and to show you relevant adverts on other sites. Details of these cookies and our advertising partners can be found in our cookie preference centre. We use cookies to measure how well our adverts do, to tell us where you saw a particular advert, and ensure you don’t see the same advert too many times

We also link to external websites where you can buy products or services featured on our site. When you click on these links, we may earn affiliate commission to help fund our not-for-profit mission. Please see our affiliate page for more information. The third parties we work with track your activity using cookies and cookies will be dropped if you click on the link. If you do not consent to this then please visit the external website directly.

What we do NOT use cookies for

We never show adverts from third parties on our websites. We will never sell your data to anyone else for any reason. To read more about the information we may collect about you when you interact with our website or use our services, and how we protect that information, please read our Privacy Notice.

Some cookies are essential for making our website work well and cannot be turned off. All other cookies are turned off by default when you first visit our website and you can choose to turn these on, or turn them back off if you previously accepted these and have changed your mind. You can do this via our cookie banner or by clicking on "manage cookie preferences" at the top of this page to visit our cookie preference centre. You can also manage what cookies are stored on your computer directly by setting your browser to accept or reject certain cookies. However, blocking some types of cookies may mean some of the services or features on our sites won’t work properly.

First-party cookies are owned and set by Which?. Third-party cookies are set by someone else whose services we have added to our site, such as Google for measuring visits to our website. These are detailed in our cookie preference centre and all non-essential cookies (whether first or third-party) can be turned off.

If you share a link to a page on one of our sites, the platform you share it on (for example, Facebook) may set a cookie on your browser. We have no control over third-party cookies set on other sites– you can turn them off, but not through us.

Do not track (DNT) is a feature offered by some browsers which, if enabled, sends a signal to websites requesting that your browsing isn’t tracked. Currently there is no industry-wide standard that has been agreed or universally adopted to determine how such signals are handled and for that reason we do not respond to DNT requests. We will review how this feature, and other technologies similar, evolve and then take steps to incorporate as and when appropriate.

Remember that editing your cookie preferences will not remove any existing cookies from your browser. It’ll only affect the way cookies are used in future. If you want to remove any existing cookies you can do this via your browser settings.