What is a Cookie?

A cookie is a small piece of information that is sent to your browser-- along with a Web page-- when you access a Web site. There are two kinds of cookies. A session cookie is a line of text that is stored temporarily in your computer's RAM. Because a session cookie is never written to a drive, it is destroyed as soon as you close your browser. A persistent cookie is a more permanent line of text that gets saved by your browser to a file on your hard drive. Depending on your browser settings, you may receive notification that a given site is requesting cookie information, possibly with an expiration date. Persistent cookies have an expiration date in the future. Session cookies have no date associated with them.

CIO.gov's Use of Cookies

The site will create a session cookie whenever you log into CIO.gov. The session cookie is destroyed when you click the logout icon or after 20 minutes of inactivity. CIO.gov does not create any persistent cookies.

For more information on privacy and security, see GSA’s Privacy and Security Policy.

If you have any questions about these policies, contact us.