what is a tracking cookie?

Question

i've run a security scan,it says i had a tracking cookie,i've sorted it out but wondered what it is,thanks

Answer 1

A cookie is a small file which a website stores on your computer. Most of these can be useful, and essentially benign, have info such as your log in name, your site preferances and the like stored in.

A tracking cookie is similar and as the name suggests it's purpose is to keep tabs on what parts of a site you have visited etc. Normally the purpose of these is market research, understanding peoples browsing habits allow adverts to be better targeted at appropriate audiences.

However, this is normally viewed as an invasion of privacy, and can pose a security risk.

It is best that you remove these cookies asap, just to be safe

You can set your browser to delete cookies when you have finished your session or use a tool such as ccleaner to remove them

Answer 2

Cookie is the data stored on the client machine while browsing the sites. Some cookies are stored in the encrypted format and some are stored in the plain text. Such plain text cookies can be misused. These are tracking cookies.

Answer 3

A cookie is a piece of text that some Internet Web sites place on your PC hard disk drive. The purpose of a cookie is to analyze Web traffic or to customize the Web page for you, like displaying local weather or a banner ad

Answer 4

A tracking cookie is in no way shape or form harmless. As the name suggests you should remove it.Never keep Tracking Cookies

Answer 5

a tracking cookie keeps 'track' of your visits to a particular web site

like - mysales.com

so when you visit you get my first offer 10 widgets for the remarkably low price of $10 - and tracking cookie A

when you visit next time My computer sees cookie A
- I don't want to show you the widgets again, cause you did not buy them the first time, and I don't want to aggravate you -
so you see the dozen bloopers Ad- and your computer gets cookie B

third visit - My computers sees cookies A and B
and you get the "buy 1 widget - get 1 blooper free" Advertisement - and you get cookie C - see?

tracking cookie 101 class is over

Answer 6

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.
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 7

ninety 9% of monitoring cookies are harmless. once you circulate to a internet site, that internet site could save some counsel on your laptop. it quite is pronounced as a monitoring cookie. If the region shops something inner maximum like your credit card extensive form, which would be risky, yet somebody could ought to understand the place to look for it and supposedly merely the region that wrote the cookie can study the cookie in a protracted time. do not difficulty approximately monitoring cookies except somebody tells you a pair of particular internet site it quite is a issue. merely enable them to lie because of the fact they many times comprise harmless counsel that a internet site makes use of to maintain music of your visits. in case you want finished privateness, configure your browser to delete the cookies each and every time you shut the browser. which will make your surfing journey much less exciting when you consider which you will ought to log in to each internet site as quickly as extra - all of us hate to ought to try this.

Answer 8

A code imbedded in your computer that signals to another computer when you enter the same website the tracking cookie is activated....

Answer 9

tracking coockie(cookie)is what you get sometimes when you enter some sites from the internet,this will give them a signal from your computer to track you when ever you enter another site,some of its is risky and some are not

Answer 10

cookies are small text files that websites store to do things like to remember your password, remember settings for a website, etc. they arent harmful, but if there is too many, it could slow down ur computer and u should delete them.