Mmm, cookies. Choc chip, hazelnut, oaty, what's not to like? Sadly, this isn't about the yummy sort of cookies, but the computer kind.

A Europe-wide regulation has just come into force (Regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Act, for those who like to know such things). It's aimed at preserving people's privacy online, and it affects the way websites use "cookies". It's given us a prompt to tell you about how 10:10 uses them.

These cookies are tiny bits of data. They're sent out from a website when you first access it, saved by your browser, then sent back to the website whenever you visit a page on it. Depending on the information in the cookie, the website can tell things like whether you've visited before, if you're logged in, or what software you have. They can even be set by other sites ("Third party cookies") - a YouTube video embedded on a page could set a cookie to be used if the person viewing the page later visits the main YouTube site.

 Websites which put cookies on people's browsers must tell their users that they do this and tell them what the cookies are for.

Most of the things cookies are used for are quite innocent. Some things that websites do, like remembering login names, won't even work without cookies. There is one particular use of cookies that many people are concerned about though. Ever idly browsed a shopping site, then clicked away to somewhere else, only to find that hat/lightbulb/camera you glanced at pushed by ads at every turn?

That's because a cookie was put onto your browser by the first site, recording what you were looking at. When you reach another site hosting ads from the same company, it reads the cookie and chooses which ads to show you based on the data in it. This sort of cross-site cookie is considered by some to be a privacy risk, as well as very irritating. It's one of the main things the new rules are concerned with.

What the new regs say, in a nutshell, is that websites which put cookies on people's browsers must tell their users that they do this, tell them what the cookies are for, and make sure their users consent (either by ticking a box, or by carrying on using the site once they've been told about them) to them being put there. There's a bit more to it than that, but those are the basics - for more detail, visit the Information Commissioners Office site.

So, we want to tell you all about the cookies that 10:10 uses and why. We don't think we use any in a way that would harm your privacy, and we hope you'll agree. It would be very difficult for us to operate the site without cookies, so if you continue to use it, you're agreeing to them.

You can delete cookies put on your machine, or change your browser settings to refuse them - visit the Interactive Advertising Bureau at www.allaboutcookies.org for information on how to do this.

 Cookies on 10:10

• CSRF cookie. This is a security cookie which stops anyone sending anything through any forms on the site if they're not actually on the site at the time. It's to prevent certain types of hacker attack.
• Javascript detect cookie. This checks to see if javascript, a piece of software used by our site, is installed on your machine. If it isn't, it makes sure you see a slightly different page, which works without it.
• Google Analytics cookies. These are set by Google (at our request) and used to track how people use the website - things like how often people visit, which pages they visit, how long they stay.

The information is compiled into a report, which we access through a service called Google Analytics. Having the information Google Analytics provides is vital for us to make our site better. Without it we would only be able to see which pages were visited, with no detail at all about how people arrived and browsed around on the site.

That means we wouldn't be able to see when there were problems. For instance, if people are leaving as soon as they reach a certain page, we know to take a look and find out why - maybe the page is boring or confusing. It also helps us tell which things you like, so that we can do more of them.

So, we hope you'll let us carry on using the cookies that give us this information. If you still don't want to accept cookies from 10:10, you can change your browser settings to stop them.

You can find out more about how 10:10 uses information you give us, including cookies, in our Legal and Privacy policy.

Finally, here's a great recipe for the nice sort of cookies: Chocolate Crinkle Cookies from BBC Good Food