Use of Web Site Cookies

Cognos is committed to continually improving the experience for our visitors as they browse our web site. Cookies help us to effectively identify unique anonymous visitors and understand their navigation of our site during each visit.

The information we gather in this way helps us improve both the content and the navigation of our site for the majority of our visitors. Also, when visitors to our site run into problems, either with their browser version or our XHTML/XML implementation, cookies allow us to isolate their specific session in our log files. This provides us with clues as we try to replicate the visitor’s environment and isolate the problem they are experiencing. Further, we may use cookies to personalize our site and offer secure services for each visitor, such as the use of our Cognos Support Accelerator remote diagnostics service.

A unique anonymous visitor to our site remains anonymous in all cases. We do not use cookies for any purposes other than those outlined above.

Please read our Privacy Policy as this includes information about our collection, use, and dissemination of personal and non-personal information gathered on our web site.

What Is A Cookie?

A “cookie” is a small piece of information that is sent by a web server to be stored on a web browser, so that it can later be read back from that browser the next time this unique visitor returns to that web server. This becomes useful for having the browser remember specific information about this visitor like location of their last visit, time spent, or user preferences (like style sheets). The cookie is a text file that is saved in the browser’s directory and is stored in memory while the browser is running. Also, the cookie may be stored on the computer’s hard drive once you log off from that web site or close your browser so that it can be read the next time you return to that web site.

What Are Cookies Used For?

One use of cookies is for storing user IDs and passwords for specific web sites. We do not currently do this on the Cognos site, although your browser may offer to remember your user IDs and passwords for you. Cookies are often also used to store preferences of start pages. On sites with personalized viewing, your web browser will be requested to utilize a small amount of space on your computer’s hard drive to store these preferences. That way, each time you log on to that web site, your browser will check to see if you have any pre-defined preferences (a cookie) for that unique server. If you do, the browser will send the cookie to the server along with your request for a web page. Common uses for which web sites utilize cookies include: on-line ordering systems, site personalization, and web site tracking.

Site personalization is one of the most beneficial uses for cookies. While we do not currently use cookies for this purpose on the Cognos site we do hope to introduce this feature at some time in the future.

Some visitors feel it is an invasion of privacy for a web site to track their progress on a site. At Cognos we use this knowledge strictly for the purpose of making your visits to our site as productive as possible. We want to get you the information or services you seek as quickly as possible and allow you to get back to work without delay. Site navigation statistics are critical to the continuing redesign of our site. We need to know if 100 different people visited our site or if one person (or web robot) continuously hit the reload button 100 times.

How Do These Cookies Work?

A command line in the XHTML code of a document tells the browser to set a cookie of a certain name or value.

What about security? To our knowledge, an HTTP Cookie cannot be used to retrieve personal data from your hard drive, install a virus, get your email address, or steal sensitive information about who you are; however, an HTTP Cookie may be used to track where you travel over a particular site. Site tracking cannot be done accurately without the use of cookies.

As with everything else about the Internet, you are only as anonymous as you wish to be. No web site knows who you are until you reveal to it who you are. In the meantime, a cookie is simply a means of tracking site statistics in order to better understand usage patterns and to improve visitor productivity. A cookie is our way of remembering that information. The extent of that knowledge will not go beyond our site. Therefore, your identity will not become public to the entire Internet because you visited our site. While you may perceive that your privacy is being violated, if you visit our site and do not register for a web user account, we will not know who you are. If you do not reveal private information to the Internet, it will not be known to the Internet.

If our web site designers wish to make web pages more interactive for our visitors, or if they plan on letting visitors customize the appearance of the site, then they will need to use cookies.

Cognos implements the use of cookies on this web site to analyze traffic flow, in order to continuously improve the site and further serve our visitors’ needs. Also, cookies assist in troubleshooting problems reported by users. Without the use of cookies, proxy server accesses make it impossible to distinguish between individual visitors in the access log without requiring user log-ins for site access. Therefore, the use of cookies is for the overall benefit of the site visitor, and to help influence future web site content and navigational changes based upon the observed preferences and behavior of our visitors.