First, let’s take a look at what a ‘cookie’ really is. A cookie is a small file containing text only, which attaches itself to your hard drive for most websites you visit. They are essentially little messages for the web sites that remain on your hard drive until you manually delete them or use some type of ‘cleaning’ software. Cookies will keep track of your activities on the web site itself and can be opened and read by the host web server at any point in time.
There are many reasons why a website might use cookies; however, most use them to collect demographic information about their visitors. They examine how long you stayed on their website, how often you come, and which of their pages you looked at while you were there. They can use this to help refine their marketing strategies to match the preferences of the visitors. For instance, if a certain page gets most of the site traffic, then they may try to update that page more frequently, or put more advertising on it.
The main benefit of cookies is that they can actually help you to navigate websites, especially the ones that you make purchases from, or fill out forms on. Cookies can remember this information so that you do not have to fill it out repeatedly every time you make a new purchase. Shopping websites may also make recommendations based on other purchases you have made in the past. The server stores which pages you looked at and which pages you purchased from.
Another reason a website may use cookies is to monitor your advertising messages. As you will have noticed, most sites run many banner ads on their pages. The cookies can help determine for the host server which banner ads you have seen and which ones you have not seen. This can be very helpful to the company from a business standpoint because they are able to tell advertisers that site visitors will see each of their ads an approximate number of times each time they visit the site. This would be like a television channel telling advertisers how many viewers watch a particular TV show.
Unfortunately, there are some cookies that store personal information that you may not want other people to know about. Depending on the type of cookie used, it can identify the type of computer you are working on, the software you use, and possibly other sites you have visited. An unscrupulous site could make this information about you available for sale to outside advertisers, marketing firms, or spam emailers. Unless you clear them out yourself, cookies will remain on your computer for years.
On the other hand, cookies do not actually compromise your internet security. It is true that they do compromise your privacy, but because cookies are simple text files, they cannot hurt your computer in any fashion. Remember it is not an executable program, or malware, or spyware and it is unable to spread a virus. In fact, they cannot even access any of your hard drive information. Most cookies typically only have a few parameters that can be stored within them. Cookies usually contain the name of the cookie, the value of the cookie, and the expiration date of the cookie (how long the cookie will stay active on your system).
If you are bothered by the use of cookies, there are ways you can deal with them. For instance, you can have your computer set to notify you whenever a website tries to leave a cookie on your hard drive. You would then have the option of either accepting or declining it, depending on your own preferences towards the site you are visiting. You could comfortably accept cookies from sites that you regularly visit or make purchases from. However, for sites that you are just surfing through and you do not expect to return to; you can simply decline the cookies.
Once you start to monitor cookies, you will very quickly discover there are a few web sites that go completely crazy with cookies. The majority of sites will let you in with either a few or no requests for cookies. However, others will attempt to set cookies on your hard drive dozens of times. You will actually have to decline their requests for cookies over and over again in order to get in. In most cases, it is best just to skip a site like that and go elsewhere.
When it comes to cookies, for the most part they are quite innocuous. You will have to decide for yourself if you are comfortable being monitored by the web sites that you visit. It is simple enough to block cookies from your system, however doing this may prevent you from getting to certain sites, or interfere in other ways with your browsing. If you do decide to accept cookies, you should at least make sure to clear them out on a regular basis.