What are cookies?
Cookies are small text files that a website stores on your computer or mobile device when you visit it.

First-party cookies are cookies placed by the website you are visiting. They can only be read from the specific site. In addition, the website may possibly use external services, which also place their own cookies, so-called third-party cookies.
Persistent cookies are cookies that are stored on your computer and are not automatically deleted when you close your browser, unlike session cookies, which are deleted when you close your browser.
Each time you visit the Commission’s websites, you will be asked to accept or reject cookies.

This is so that the website can remember your preferences (such as username, language, etc.) for a certain period of time.

So you don’t need to re-enter them when you browse the site during the same visit.

Cookies can also be used to collect anonymous statistics about your browsing experience on the Commission’s websites.

How do we use cookies?
The Commission’s websites mainly use site-viewing cookies. These are cookies placed and controlled by the Commission and not by an external organization.

However, to view some of our websites, you will need to accept cookies from external organisations.

The 3 types of site-viewing cookies we use have the purpose of:

storing visitor preferences
improving the functionality of our websites;
the collection of analytics data (about user behavior)
Visitor preference cookies

These are placed by us and can only be read by us. They memorize the following:

whether you have accepted (or rejected) the cookie policy of the respective website
if you have already answered the pop-up window asking you to complete our survey (about how useful the website content was) so that you are not asked again