What are Cookies?

A Cookie or an Internet Cookie is a small piece of text that a website stores on your computer’s hard disc. The text file is designed to hold a modest amount of data where with website stores information and can then later retrieve it. For example, a Web site might generate a unique ID number for each visitor and store the ID number on each user's machine using a cookie file.

If you go to Amazon for example, they place a cookie which contains session-id-time 567842000 amazon.com/ session-id 002-9285632-09518532 amazon.com/ x-main 2x6VWAXh@Ih6Uo5H amazon.com/

What this tells Amazon is unique USER ID, A session ID and the session time the user started. E-Commerce sites like Amazon.com that have shopping carts all use cookies. The cookie contains an ID and lets the site keep track of you as you add different things to your cart. Each item you add to your shopping cart is stored in the site's database along with your ID value. When you check out, the site knows what is in your cart by retrieving all of your selections from the database. It would be impossible to implement a convenient shopping mechanism without cookies or something like them. Other Data Cookies Can Store.

Here are some other bits of information that cookies can store.

• Your Web browser and version

• Your operating system

• Your IP address (where you are accessing the from)

• The date and time

• What page was visited using that browser and OS

• A unique ID that the website generates for you the first time your browser arrives

• Any information you provide via forms on the website

Are Cookies Dangerous?

Some people believe that cookies are dangerous and/or they violate your privacy. This is really not the case. Cookies as not inherently dangerous as they only store information that you have provided to the website. You do however have to watch when you are accessing the internet via a public computer or a computer other people use. If you have logged into your account eg, Amazon, always remember to log out before you leave the computer. Web sites and web developers cannot gain access to information you have not provided them. It is better not to accept third party cookies and to delete your cookies frequently (Internet Explorer Example Attached)