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What Are Cookies? Cookies were created by Netscape's persistent client-side state information (PCSSI). It's a way for your browser to save information on your hard drive for later retrieval, so a Web site knows when you've been there and how many times, what pages you've visited, and the last page you visited. Leo doesn't believe that they have access to things like your e-mail address and configuration information. Cookies are useful for a number of reasons. For example, when you go to the New York Times Web site, it asks for a login password and whether you want to save that information. If you do, a cookie is deposited on your hard drive, so the next time you go to that site, you'll either see your information already typed in or the site won't ask for it at all. Cookies are also used to save your preferences: A Web site can save your preferences or options on how you like to view your page's frames and Shockwave animation. Most often, Web sites use it for marketing information: How many visits, how often, when the last visit occured, downloads, and so on. In general, cookies are not an invasion of privacy because they are only accesible to the site that saved them in the first place. It could concievably be a problem if other sites could access your hard drive and see what other sites you were visiting, but that's not the case. The original implementation of cookies did allow this, but that was disabled long ago. Currently, only the Web site that sets a cookie can access it. There is one way a cookie can work to the advantage of advertisers: A cookie could be set on your hard drive saying you've been to a Web site or clicked on a banner; this could be used to vary the ads that you see while you're surfing, or serve you ads that they think you might like, based on your past click-through history. A site can't track your movement in general, only within that particular site. For example, horse racing to horse vet, they can make sure you get horse related banner ads. Some people see this as an invasion of privacy. Different Web browsers (Netscape and IE4) handle cookies in different ways. Most browsers are set by default to accept all cookies, but you can easily set them to refuse all cookies by unchecking the Accept all cookies box in your browser's Settings menu. You can also select Prompt before accepting. The drawback to refusing all cookies is you might not be able to get certain portions of Web sites, as cookies are a prerequisite to getting around on some Web sites. The truth is, it can be more of a hassle to select Prompt before accepting, since some sites set thousands of cookies in every session. It might be much more annoying to have that dialog box come up for every one. |