Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
Sezione di Padova

What are cookies?

Cookies are small piece of information that web sites store in user's browser while visiting the site and take back from the browser on subsequent visits. In this way a web site is able to recognize a user coming back to the site or browsing different sections of the site.

While browsing on a particular website, the browser may receive cookies that refer to different websites (third-party cookies): this normally happens because visited pages contain elements (such as images, banners, buttons, small applications) that the browser downloads from sites other than the one that the user is visiting.

Cookies may stay in the browser only until the user closes it, or may persist until a certain date, or for unlimited time.

Cookies can be divided into two categories, according to the purposes for which they are used:

1. technical cookies: used for the sole purpose of ensuring or improving the navigation and use of the website, such as recognizing a user during the various phases of an online survey or purchase (session cookies); or adapting navigation to the choices made by the user, such as preferred language, country of origin, operating system, etc. (functionality cookies).
   Cookies used to gather aggregated statistics on how users navigate the site (analytics cookies) are included in this category too.
2. profiling cookies: used for the purpose of creating a user profile, generally with the aim to send advertising messages tailored to the preferences shown during navigation.

Cookies management

Most browsers allow you to choose whether to accept cookies, from which sites to accept them, when to delete them. Here are the references to the instructions for cookies management for most commonly used browsers:

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Internet Explorer
• Opera
• Safari

Use of cookies on the website of INFN Section of Padova

The website of the INFN Section of Padova does not use profiling cookies, either directly, or through third parties.
Technical cookies are not used either, with the exception of some areas reserved for the staff of the Section (webmail and user account management) where session cookies are used for the sole purpose of managing the user's working session. We do not use cookies to analyze the use of the site by visitors, nor for other statistical purposes.

However, this site hosts personal pages of some users (http://www.pd.infn.it/~username...): as specified under the disclaimer, the responsibility for the content of these pages, including compliance with any requirements related to the use of cookies, lies with the users that have published them.