What exactly are cookies (the kind that are on your computer)???

Question

What do they do, what are they for, and can you eat them....?

Answer 1

If you want to access this website, all you have to do is accept a cookie? They are files, tiny software programs, which allow certain interactions on the internet. If you don't give them access to your pc, your pc will not be granted access to (parts of) a website.

Answer 2

Some side tell you ..you need the cookies in order to be on there site. Good one for site like micosoft is ok..but other is not. Cookie can be ok but be very harmful and why. ok let say you order only one book from 1 company only and then all of a sudden your finding more and more books from other company you didn't order from or give your address to. Well the first company gives out your address to others and have that right to do that with out you knowing. So cookie are the same thing. Your on a website and a cookie is put in a folder called cookies and each time you go to the site is sends a cookie which is a small text. Now what it does it can record the site you been to over and over and some how they can read what ever they add in that cookie and you new the new day have your mailbox full of spamm..that what cookies do

Answer 3

you can't eat them but i wish i could
Cookies are actually harmless text files that certain web sites will place onto the hard drive of your computer. Your Internet Browser will then load the information into memory while you are visiting their site. The Cookie itself, actually takes up very little space and acts as an identification card for the visiting site. You can compare this to visiting your favorite restaurant where your food server will usually remember certain aspects of how you like your food prepared and what you usually order. This information would obviously be based upon his familiarity of your prior visits. Well Cookies actually act in a similar manner and do not contain viruses as a virus must be executable file. Let us look at some of the ways that Cookies act as an identification card.

Answer 4

What Are Internet Cookies?




Cookies

Cookies are actually harmless text files that certain web sites will place onto the hard drive of your computer. Your Internet Browser will then load the information into memory while you are visiting their site. The Cookie itself, actually takes up very little space and acts as an identification card for the visiting site. You can compare this to visiting your favorite restaurant where your food server will usually remember certain aspects of how you like your food prepared and what you usually order. This information would obviously be based upon his familiarity of your prior visits. Well Cookies actually act in a similar manner and do not contain viruses as a virus must be executable file. Let us look at some of the ways that Cookies act as an identification card.

Why Sites Use Cookies?

There are numerous reasons why websites would want to use cookies. These range from statistical purposes, such as how many visitors came to the site. This can be further broken down into are they new visitors or actually repeating visitors and how often do they visit. The Website would actually create a unique id for each visitor and store this information into a database.

Cookies can be used to store your personal preferences, referred to as customizations, that you set while navigating their site. For instance, if you visit Yahoo.com, you can sign in to create your very own personal yahoo page where you can customize it according to your news and weather preferences after providing your zip code. You can even change the color of the page layout as well.

Online Shopping sites can use cookies to keep track of items that you add to their shopping carts and quick checkout options. The cookie will keep track of every item that you add to the shopping cart while you continue to browse through different pages or even entirely different sections of their site. Every item you add is stored within the Web site’s database along with a unique ID value that has been assigned to you. Therefore, when you select the check out option, the site automatically knows what items are in your cart by retrieving those selections from its database. This is why sites such as Amazon or eBay will prompt you to enable cookies in case you have disabled them.

Cookies also provide web designers and programmers with a quick and convenient method of keeping their site content fresh and up to date according to the interests of their users. Modern web servers use Cookies for back-end interaction as well, allowing them to securely store any personal data that the user has entered within a site. Therefore, on return visits the user now only has to enter partial information to access their account and purchases can be made quicker as their payment information is on file regarding their previous purchases.

In closing, as Cookies are actually small text files, they really can not damage your computer system or any files on your hard drive. Once again, they cannot transmit viruses as viruses are executable in nature. Some users may just not want to be tracked and this is one of the primary reasons why many people just disable accepting cookies.

Answer 5

cookies are files used to remember usernames/passwords to websites you have been to. for instance, have you ever gone to myspace and started to enter your username and a thing pops up that already has it there for you? that is a cookie. and no you can't eat it. you do want to delete these every so often because they can be used by spyware to get your information. hope this is what you are looking for.

Answer 6

(Internet Browser) - Holds information on the times and dates you have visited web sites. Other information can also be saved to your hard disk in these text files, including information about online purchases, validation information about you for members-only web sites, and more.