2007-04-11 20:21:03 · 13 answers · asked by July 1 in Computers & Internet ➔ Security
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.
2007-04-11 20:26:39 · answer #1 · answered by G 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Not all of them are bad, depends on what websites you visit, some are actually necessary.
It's just a bit of information reserved on your computer to say that you visited a particular site. If you don't want a site reserving information about your visit, just delete the cookie for that site and don't visit that site again. Like I said though, you need some cookies to remain stored on your computer because it might be a site you need to download important updates or drivers for your computer, and these things are quite necessary, so, reserve those cookies.
2007-04-11 20:31:33 · answer #2 · answered by Abstract 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Cookies are web pages that are saved as temporary internet files. They offer shortcuts so your computer can access those sites more quickly when you want to go back to them.
They can be good because they give you faster access to sites you want to go to frequently, and they can save security access pages you use as well.
But they can also be used as part of spyware or can contain viruses, or can just clutter up your hard drive.
Most anti-spyware programs will target cookies and you will normally delete them if you do a disk cleanup.
I personally think its good to clean them out, even if that occasionally makes access a little slower for you. You should be concerned about viruses and spyware. Cookies may or may not be a problem.
2007-04-11 20:40:02 · answer #3 · answered by Warren D 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Cookies are just small .txt (text) files that by themselves cannot hurt your computer. They are not a virus, but some people consider "tracking" cookies to be an invasion of privacy.
It all depends on one's level of paranoria.
Tracking cookies are mostly "3rd party cookies" from advertising servers. They can track your movements around the web in order to deliver to you customised, targeted advertising.
If you are using Internet Explorer for a browser, you can permanantly block all 3rd party cookies. Go to tools > internet options > privacy > advanced > checkmark "override automatic cookie handling" > third party cookies > tick "block" > ok > ok.
2007-04-11 20:39:03 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Cookies are simple files containing information that a website wishes to save to your hard disk so that you dont have to enter that information again and again.
For example, if you visit a news site, and tells the site about your location, the web site sends a cookie to your computer, storing the information about your location, so you dont have to tell the site the same thing again and again.
Whenever you revisit the site, the site will access the cookie and know that you wish to see the news about that location.
The mechanism is used for storing preferences etc. for sites like hotmail, or yahoo etc.
2007-04-11 20:49:19 · answer #5 · answered by StarChaser 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Cookies can be good and bad. When you visit your favourite forum or your Yahoo! Mail for example, thanks to the cookies on your computer, you don't need to lo gin all the times.
Bad cookies may cause that you get pop-ups or ads from some websites and if you know the name of that website, you can look for the related cookie and delete it.
On some on-line gaming or download websites, you get to play for a certain amount of time or download for a limited amount of data. Again, if you know which cookie belongs to those websites, you can delete it and restart playing or downloading again.
2007-04-11 20:36:22 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Cookies are a way that websites store information on your surfing trends/habits/preferences on your PC. They can then use this information to tailor the pages content, sign you in to sites, or look at what pages you have accessed.
They are generally safe, but some cookies can be used to store personal information about you.
Keep a good anti spyware/malware program installed on your pc and be careful with your surfing habits, and you wont have any problems.
Chris
2007-04-11 20:27:49 · answer #7 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
Cookies, Histories, and Defragmenting Cookies are bits of coaching positioned on your computing device by technique of in basic terms about each internet website you visit. some cookies have a useful objective, which incorporates allowing you to get admission to an internet site with out having to log in each and every time you visit. different cookies aren't from now on so innocuous. monitoring cookies will be positioned on your computing device to keep up at the same time with your surfing events. Cookies are common to delete and should be deleted on a general foundation. in basic terms open your browser, click on equipment / internet recommendations and hit the delete cookies button. After deleting the cookies, you would ought to log decrease back in to coach internet web pages the subsequent time you visit. you ought to consistently keep person names and passwords written down in a secure region to make logging in common.
2016-12-03 21:34:23 · answer #8 · answered by ? 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Cookies can be helpful by speed up your internet surfing experience by prompting your web browser to remember that you have visited a site. However, recently tracking cookies and modified cookies have been operating a spyware so its best to remove them.
http://www.delete-computer-history.com/delete-cookie-history.html
2007-04-11 20:32:12 · answer #9 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Cookies - What they are and how they are used
http://spywarekiller.hyperboards.com/index.php?action=view_topic&topic_id=15
Use one of the Clean up tools to clear out cookies,other junk from your computer and prevent people from tracing your internet surfing
http://securitynewsfromthenet.blogspot.com/2007/03/clean-up-tools-to-prevent-people-from.html
How to block advertisements and tracking cookies permanently
http://securitynewsfromthenet.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-block-adversments-and-tracking.html
2007-04-12 03:50:14 · answer #10 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋