Internet cookies are small pieces of information in text format that are downloaded to your computer when you visit many Web sites. The cookie may come from the Web site itself or from the providers of the advertising banners or other graphics that make up a Web page. Thus visiting a single Web site can actually result in the downloading of multiple cookies, each from a different source. You may never actually visit a page of one of the major advertising agencies like Doubleclick.com but you will still get cookies from them.
Most Internet cookies are incredibly simple, but they are one of those things that have taken on a life of their own. Cookies started receiving tremendous media attention back in 2000 because of Internet privacy concerns, and the debate still rages. The designers of almost every major site use them because they provide a better user experience and make it much easier to gather accurate information about the site's visitors.
Cookies typically contain some kind of ID number, a domain that the cookie is valid for, and an expiration date. They may also contain other tracking information such as login names and pages visited.
Each type of Internet browser designates a particular place for storing cookies.
Internet Explorer (IE) has a folder Cookies\ where cookies are kept as small individual text files, one for each cookie. In Windows 98/Me, the IE cookie folder is a sub-folder of the Windows folder. Windows XP has different folders, one for each user, \Documents and Settings\[User name]\Cookies\.
Since AOL uses Internet Explorer underneath its proprietary interface, it employs the same method as IE and cookies are in the same place.
Netscape and Mozilla related browsers use a single text file, cookies.txt, with each cookie occupying one or more lines within this one file. location of the file depends on your version and type of browser.
The easiest way to find where cookies are kept is to do a Find or Search either on the folder name "Cookies" or the file name "cookies.txt", depending on your browser.
Although some cookies provide a useful function, many others may not be desirable. As the Internet has evolved from its beginnings in academia and government to a commercial enterprise, cookies have inevitably been turned into a tracking mechanism used by advertisers. In principle, cookies are only accessible to the site that originated them but large advertising agencies with many clients can easily circumvent this restriction by collecting information for all their clients under one domain. A fairly harmless (and perhaps even useful) advertising application of cookies is to rotate banner ads as you go from page to page to make sure that you do not see the same ads over and over. It should be emphasized that cookies are plain text files and, as such, are not executable programs and cannot do anything to your computer.
Many PC users do nothing to manage cookies and simply accept whatever comes their way. This policy of neglect had more to recommend it back when cookie management was fairly arduous and time-consuming. Today, however, the obstacles to cookie management are low enough that at least some form of basic management should be a standard practice.
Controlling cookies isn't that difficult and here are some methods.
In theory you can simply refuse all cookies. All standard browsers allow for this option.
A better alternative is to selectively block and/or remove undesirable cookies while keeping good ones. There are a number of approaches. One way is by do-it-yourself methods involving such things as editing the actual contents of the IE cookie folder. This is tedious and there are better ways. The major browsers have added ways of selectively configuring for cookies.
How Internet Cookies Work?
Cookies are programs that Web sites put on your hard disk. They sit on your computer gathering information about you and everything you do on the Internet, and whenever the Web site wants to it can download all of the information the cookie has collected. Wrong. Definitions like that are fairly common in the press. The problem is, none of that information is correct. Cookies are not programs, and they cannot run like programs do. Therefore, they cannot gather any information on their own. Nor can they collect any personal information about you from your machine.
Here is a valid definition of a cookie: A cookie is a piece of text that a Web server can store on a user's hard disk. Cookies allow a Web site to store information on a user's machine and later retrieve it. The pieces of information are stored as name-value pairs.
Web sites use cookies in many different ways. Here are some examples:
Sites can accurately determine how many people actually visit the site. It turns out that because of proxy servers, caching, concentrators and so on, the only way for a site to accurately count visitors is to set a cookie with a unique ID for each visitor. Using cookies, sites can determine: How many visitors arrive, How many are new vs. repeat visitors and How often a visitor has visited
The way the site does this is by using a database. The first time a visitor arrives, the site creates a new ID in the database and sends the ID as a cookie. The next time the user comes back, the site can increment a counter associated with that ID in the database and know how many times that visitor returns. Sites can store user preferences so that the site can look different for each visitor. For example, if you visit msn.com, it offers you the ability to "change content/layout/color." It also allows you to enter your zip code and get customized weather information.
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