Cookies By: Kendra Alvarez

Concepts of Cookies Cookies are pieces of information generated by a Web server and stored in the user's computer, ready for future access. Cookies are embedded in the HTML information flowing back and forth between the user's computer and the servers. Cookies were implemented to allow user-side customization of Web information. For example, cookies are used to personalize Web search engines, to allow users to participate in WWW-wide contests (but only once!), and to store shopping lists of items a user has selected while browsing through a virtual shopping mall.

Cookies are based on a two-stage process First the cookie is stored in the user's computer without their consent or knowledge. For example, with customizable Web search engines like My Yahoo!, a user selects categories of interest from the Web page. The Web server then creates a specific cookie, which is essentially a tagged string of text containing the user's preferences, and it transmits this cookie to the user's computer. The second stage, the cookie is clandestinely and automatically transferred from the user's machine to a Web server. Whenever a user directs her Web browser to display a certain Web page from the server, the browser will, without the user's knowledge, transmit the cookie containing personal information to the Web server.

Can Cookies harm your computer? Cookies cannot harm your computer. The general controversy is not what cookies can do to your computer, but what information they can store, and what they can pass on to servers, there is currently a new proposal to limit the features of the cookie protocol, which would give people a greater control over what cookies they can accept and from where.

When Cookies go bad!! If you're convinced that cookies pose a threat to your privacy, and you're willing to live without the convenience they provide, there are a variety of ways to block, delete and even totally prevent cookies. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer give users the option to control cookies in a variety of ways.

Firefox With Firefox, go to Tools/Options/Privacy/Cookies and you'll have the option to accept, refuse, view or delete cookies. The option to accept cookies "for the originating website only" may be a good compromise because it eliminates cookies from third-party ad serving firms such as Double-click. With Internet Explorer, you can do much the same thing by selecting Tools/Internet Options/Security/Custom Level. Checking the "Warn before accepting cookies" box does give you the option to accept cookies only from sites you trust, but gets really annoying after a while.

Other choices…. Another idea is to make your cookies file read- only. This will prevent any new cookies from being written to your hard disk, while allowing cookies to function normally during a single browser session. So you could still use online shopping sites, but you'd miss out on the ability to use customization features at sites like Yahoo. Deleting your cookies file(s) after closing your browser would have pretty much the same effect.