What does it really mean when a website says that they track the people who visit their website thru "cookies"

Question

It goes on to say something about passwords and web pages that you visit. Does this mean that by visiting their website - they gain access to your password and then can track what other types of websites you visit? I really dont know much about the internet (obvisously) and I was just curious.

Answer 1

cookies can allow them to tell what website you have come from to visit their site. How long you stay on their site, what pages on the site you look at, how long on each page, the number of times you visit, and what time you exit.
Cookies are usually used to save some kind of information onto your computer. (Ever seen a "remember me" tick box on a log-in form? If you tick that box a cookie is saved on your computer which will keep you logged in until it is deleted, by clicking the log out box or by not visiting the site after x-amount of days.)
Cookies can't give people access to your computer, they are simply bits of code that are saved into your temp. internet files that interact with a websites own code, (a cookie only gets written or deleted when you interact with the site that created it - so it can't monitor what you do externaly.)

Answer 2

Cookies are part of HTTP protocol.

They specify a bit of information (and an expiration date for that information) to be stored on your browser and returned to them next time you load a page.

In truth, you never "log in" to any website, HTTP is a completely stateless protocol. (stateless in that the web server has no real information connecting the different page loads) this means, among other things, there is no way to connect "you" to the contents of your "shopping cart" because as far as the web server is concerned, you might as well be two different people!

Cookies are a way of addressing this problem, they are generally used to hold a "session ID", which is usually a unique numeric code linking you to your shopping cart, stylesheet preferences, etc..

Cookies can NOT however, be used to determine where you came form or any of your activities on another web page. (if a browser were to allow this, it would be a violation of the specification and would be called a "bug" in the browser)

Here is the header used by a CGI script or other server program used to set a cookie.

Set-Cookie: SID=100;domain=.example.com path=/

The above sets a cookie named "SID" with a value of "100" the domain is set to .example.com (and as a security feature, the domain MUST match the URL, I can't set a cookie on msn.com for example, nor can I read cookies msn.com may have set)

The path=/ says "send this cookie for every URL on this site"

Next time your browser requests a page, it will send this header:

Cookie: SID=100

For the most part, you don't need to worry about cookies being passed between websites (unless the websites share a common subdomain)

A website called a.example.com can set a cookie with "domain=.example.com" and have the cookie show up in b.example.com, that is within the specification because they both are ".example.com"

There is something called the "Referrer" and that CAN determine where you came from, but it has nothing to do with cookies.

When a site "uses cookies to track you" typically it just means they use your session ID to determine which pages you have requested or preferences you have saved. It is the only "practical" way to connect a web browser to the shopping cart or any other "session specific" data.

You can actually observe these headers by installing special "developer plugins" on the firefox browser or use telnet to access a website directly.

Example:

telnet msn.com 80

HEAD / HTTP/1.0


That will tell the web server on msn.com to give you the head of / and assuming all goes as planned, you should see the headers they send.

Another good source is the O'Reilly "HTTP pocket reference"

If you really want to be put to sleep, there are the RFC's pertaining to HTTP and Cookies:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2109/rfc2109

(don't expect it to be "fun" reading though...)

Answer 3

cookies will share your information (any information needed) with a website in a form of an encrypted file that translates into your username and password in most cases. It stores it on your computer for later reference so that you can allow it to automatically know your login information by that file translating with the site. Your ip and information is familiar with the site.

Answer 4

its mean they are keeping track of your activity and making sure that your not doing anything illegal or anything against the websites rules possibly. Some websites keep your ip address as well.

Answer 5

cookies are the bit of information .i.e. files which has certain commands written within it. when you visit certain websites, the websites would automatically download certain files which will run certain commands in your computer without your knowledge in background.

Answer 6

that they can track the cookies. in other words, they can see what u did on their website. that is all. nothing more.