A session is a span of time in which a web browser maintains a connection to a particular web server.

When you visit a website often, it can be valuable to automatically provide the website with information specific to who you are and how you use that website – instead of having to manually enter all of that data each time you visit the site. This could be information like your name or what kinds of news you like to read about (if, say, the website was a news website).

A cookie is a set of data that a website causes to be stored on your computer for use during a session in which you visit that website. These cookies are managed by your browser program. Cookies can be a tool to help make a particular website display the way you want it faster, or to personalize your experience on that site.

In general, there are two types of cookies: 1. temporary, and 2. persistent.

A temporary cookie expires when a web browser session ends – usually, this happens when the browser program is closed down. This is a session cookie. The cookie's data is not stored on your computer permanently.

The data in a persistent cookie is stored on your computer for a specified time period. These cookies always have expiration dates; the cookie is erased from your computer after the expiration date.

Not all websites make use of cookies. It is considered good practice for a website to inform you if it uses cookies.

EXAMPLE: If you regularly visited a shopping website, the cookie for that website might store the most common type of product you liked to purchase, so that those types of products would be displayed first when you next visited the website.