• Contact Information
• Profile information, such as your 'About Me' section
• Profile Pictures
• Photo Albums
• Friend lists
• Visitor Messages
• Group memberships

• Always use your common sense and think before you post. Try to keep information that you post about yourself fairly general and non-specific, so that you would not be easily identified by your posts.
• If you do choose to share information that can be linked to you personally, be doubly careful about what you are saying, whether it's about you or other people. Are you revealing things that you wouldn't want people you know in real life to find out? Does it falsely represent who you are? You wouldn't be the first person to have said something on the Internet that has come back to haunt them! University tutors, employers and school teachers regularly visit the site.
• TSR strongly recommends that you do not post (and may remove) information such as:
- Postal address
- E-mail address
- Landline and mobile phone numbers
- Passwords

• If you are using our Classifieds section please take extra care. Only give over personal details such as your address if you feel happy to do so. We also suggest you use Pay Pal for any payments and keep communications private rather than on the forums to avoid other people having access to your details. See the classifieds forum guide for full details of 'Trading Safely Online'.

• People on TSR may not be who they seem to be. If you do choose to meet people from TSR in the real world ensure that family or friends know where you are going and what time you intend to be back. Meet in a public place and for first meetings, no matter what your age, we would always advise you to take someone with you, or meet amongst a group of friends.
• It is not acceptable for Members to send threatening or harassing PMs, make threatening or harassing posts or write threatening or harassing reputation messages to other Members. If you feel threatened or harassed in any way by other members, please report it using the Ask A Moderator forum, or the Post Report button on individual forum posts or Private Messages. It will then be looked into by the Moderators and dealt with as necessary.
• Files attached to emails from people you don't really know or trust may contain viruses or nasty messages so it's best not to open them.
• Tell your parent or carer if someone or something makes you feel uncomfortable or worried.


Other good advice can be found here:


• Childline Online Safety - Safe Surfing
• Childline Online Safety - Use of Social Network Sites
• Childline Online Safety - Cyber Bullying

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files stored in your computer or mobile phone’s internet browser (e.g Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari). They are usually used by websites to improve services for you, to find out more information about the popularity of a website and for delivering more relevant advertising.

How does The Student Room use cookies?

The Student Room uses cookies for a number of purposes listed below.

1. Site performance cookies

We use cookies to remember some of your preferences, such as whether you want some of the boxes on the homepage and side bar to remain open or closed. A cookie is also used on smartphones to show you the desktop version of The Student Room.

2. Registration cookies

The Student Room mostly uses cookies for registered members to make the logged in functionality work, which includes:

• To remember when your last visit to the site was and activity carried out during your visit to show you new items such as unread posts.
• To remember your ‘My TSR’ custom widget settings, i.e. which boxes you would like to be shown on the My TSR page.
• To remember your side bar widget options across the site, the boxes on the right of the site.
• To remember the height of the editor boxes (the bit where you type) on post pages if you have changed them.
• If you asked the site to, we have two optional cookies to remember your username and password so you don’t have to enter it with each visit.
• To keep you logged in for a period of time while you use the site, known as a ‘session’.
• To remember you when you visit the learning areas of The Student Room so you don’t have to log in again.
• To recognise if you have a paid subscription to give you access straight away to paid features.

3. Facebook and Twitter cookies

The Student Room has buttons across the site to help you post our content to your Facebook and Twitter profiles. If you choose to use one or both of these buttons, Facebook or Twitter will use cookies for them to work. You can find out more in the Facebook and Twitter privacy policies.

4. Anonymous analytics cookies

We use Google Analytics software to monitor the number of people visiting the website, which uses a cookie to collect this information. Google Analytics only collects anonymous aggregate data, i.e. we cannot tell who you are or link data back to a specific username, and everyone’s data is shown as a whole, not individually. We use this only for statistical purposes to tell us information like how many people are new to the site or have visited before and which pages are the most popular.

5. Advertising cookies

The Student Room is primarily funded by advertising. Often we need to know whether you have seen an advert and the time since you last saw it. This is to stop you from seeing the same advert repeatedly. To be able to do this we use a cookie to say when a particular advert has been shown in your browser. It does not collect any personal information about you. The company and system we currently use to do this is called Double Click by Google and on their website you can find out more information and opt out of this cookie. However by opting out you will see less relevant advertising and are likely to see the same adverts more frequently.

6. Third party advertising cookies

A number of adverts shown across The Student Room are delivered by other third party companies called networks. These companies use their own cookies for tracking the success of their adverts and for customisations to you. The Student Room does not have access to these cookies and nor do these companies have access to the cookies we use on our site. Third party advertising cookies cannot be linked to your personal data. You can turn off third party advertising cookies by visiting the Your Online Choices control page.

7. Other third party cookies

Sometimes The Student Room will use other third party cookies to help improve the functionality of the site or to find out more information about our audience but in an anonymous way. In particular, we place cookies for Quantserve and comScore. These companies measure the audiences of websites to show how many people visit websites around the world and the type of audience that visits them. This is primarily used by advertisers to help them decide the best website to advertise on. All information they provide is anonymous and aggregate.

Occasionally we also use a service called Skimlinks which adds links to words on the site that you can click to buy products. Skimlinks uses a cookie to associate your purchase to The Student Room so that we earn a referral fee. You can read more information on this service and opt out of their cookie on the Skim Links Opt Out page.

Can I use The Student Room without cookies?

You can access The Student Room’s content without using cookies by turning them off in your browser’s settings, however you won’t be able to log in because this functionality requires cookies to remember who you are. Also, by turning cookies off you will see less relevant advertising and are likely to see the same adverts more often.

How do I turn cookies off?

Cookies are saved to the browser, so to turn off any cookie you will have to do so for each browser you use. Usually most people have concerns about the use of cookies by third party advertising companies. These cookies do not collect any personal information and are only used to tailor advertising to be more relevant for you. As mentioned above, you can turn off third party advertising cookies on the Your Online Choices control page.

Alternatively, you can turn off all cookie use within your browser by following the instructions on the below pages:

• Cookie settings in Internet Explorer
• Cookie settings in Firefox
• Cookie settings in Chrome
• Cookie settings in Safari

Where can I read more information?

You can read more information by visiting All About Cookies and Your Online Choices.