A cookie is a small text file that a website asks your browser to store, so that something can be remembered between one page and the next. This page sets out which cookies and similar technologies are involved when you read ngadgets.com, what each group is for, and how to take control of them. It sits alongside our privacy policy, which covers personal data more broadly.
Alongside cookies proper, sites commonly use local storage and session storage, which work similarly from your point of view. Where this page says cookies, treat it as covering those too.
Strictly necessary cookies
These are the ones the site cannot function without, and they are set for everybody. WordPress, which this site runs on, uses cookies to manage sessions and to protect forms against cross-site request forgery. The ecommerce components that render our product review pages set a session identifier so that page state behaves consistently as you move around.
If you fill in our contact form, an anti-spam token may be set for the duration of that submission. None of these cookies are used to track you across other websites, and none of them are used for advertising.
Performance and caching cookies
This site is served through a caching layer, which stores prebuilt copies of pages so they arrive quickly instead of being assembled from scratch on every request. Caching systems sometimes set a technical cookie to decide whether a particular request should be served from the cache or generated fresh, for example if you are a logged-in editor rather than an ordinary reader.
These cookies carry no personal information about you. They exist to answer a yes or no question about how to serve a page.
Analytics
We measure how the site is used: which reviews get read, which articles hold attention, which links get followed, roughly which country a visit came from and whether it arrived on a phone or a desktop. That measurement is what tells us which appliance categories are worth expanding and which pages are failing readers.
The analytics on this site is first-party, meaning it reports to our own infrastructure rather than feeding an advertising network. We use it in aggregate. We do not attempt to identify individual readers, we do not build advertising profiles, and we do not sell the data to anyone. If you would rather not be counted at all, the browser controls described below will stop it.
Cookies set by Amazon, which we do not control
This is the part worth reading properly. ngadgets.com participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. Product buttons and links on our review pages send you to Amazon, sometimes by way of a short redirect on our own infrastructure.
The moment you land on Amazon, Amazon sets its own cookies in your browser. Those cookies record that your visit originated with us, which is how a commission gets attributed if you go on to buy something. They are set by Amazon, stored against Amazon’s own domains, and governed entirely by Amazon’s privacy notice and cookie settings.
We want to be precise about the limits of our involvement. We cannot read those cookies, we cannot change what they contain, we cannot shorten their lifetime and we cannot delete them for you. We do not receive your name, your email address or a record of what you bought. What comes back to us from Amazon is aggregate commission reporting, not a list of identifiable shoppers. To manage Amazon’s cookies, use Amazon’s own privacy and cookie settings, or clear them in your browser.
The same principle applies to any other external site you reach from a link here. Once you leave ngadgets.com, you are under someone else’s policy.
Managing cookies in your browser
Every mainstream browser lets you review stored cookies, delete them, block them by site, or block third-party cookies wholesale. The settings live in roughly the same place in each one:
- Chrome: Settings, then Privacy and security, then Third-party cookies and Site settings.
- Firefox: Settings, then Privacy and Security, under Cookies and Site Data and Enhanced Tracking Protection.
- Safari: Settings or Preferences, then Privacy, where you can block cookies and manage stored website data. On iOS, look under Settings, Apps, Safari.
- Edge: Settings, then Cookies and site permissions.
Most browsers also offer a private or incognito window, which discards cookies when you close it. Browser extensions and some mobile operating systems add further blocking on top.
One honest warning: blocking cookies indiscriminately will break things. If you block the strictly necessary cookies described above, parts of this site and of most other sites will stop behaving properly. Blocking analytics or third-party cookies only is usually the sensible middle ground.
Changes and questions
Plugins get added and removed over the life of a site, so the exact set of cookies in play can shift. We revise this page when that happens rather than leaving a stale list behind. If you want to know about a specific cookie you have spotted, email [email protected] and we will tell you what we know about it. Our affiliate disclosure explains the commercial side of the outbound links in full.