Transcript Cookies - People Search Directory

Cookies
By: Kendra Alvarez
Concepts of Cookies
• Cookies are pieces of information generated by a Web
server and stored in the user's computer, ready for future
access.
• Cookies are embedded in the HTML information flowing
back and forth between the user's computer and the
servers.
• Cookies were implemented to allow user-side
customization of Web information.
• For example, cookies are used to personalize Web search
engines, to allow users to participate in WWW-wide
contests (but only once!), and to store shopping lists of
items a user has selected while browsing through a virtual
shopping mall.
Cookies are based on a two-stage
process
• First the cookie is stored in the
user's computer without their
consent or knowledge.
• For example, with
customizable Web search
engines like My Yahoo!, a user
selects categories of interest
from the Web page. The Web
server then creates a specific
cookie, which is essentially a
tagged string of text containing
the user's preferences, and it
transmits this cookie to the
user's computer.
• The second stage, the cookie is
clandestinely and automatically
transferred from the user's
machine to a Web server.
Whenever a user directs her
Web browser to display a
certain Web page from the
server, the browser will,
without the user's knowledge,
transmit the cookie containing
personal information to the Web
server.
Can Cookies harm your
computer?
• Cookies cannot harm your computer. The general
controversy is not what cookies can do to your
computer, but what information they can store,
and what they can pass on to servers, there is
currently a new proposal to limit the features of
the cookie protocol, which would give people a
greater control over what cookies they can accept
and from where.
When Cookies go bad!!
• If you're convinced that cookies pose a
threat to your privacy, and you're willing to
live without the convenience they provide,
there are a variety of ways to block, delete
and even totally prevent cookies. Both
Firefox and Internet Explorer give users the
option to control cookies in a variety of
ways.
Firefox
With Firefox, go to Tools/Options/Privacy/Cookies and
you'll have the option to accept, refuse, view or delete
cookies. The option to accept cookies "for the originating
website only" may be a good compromise because it
eliminates cookies from third-party ad serving firms such
as Double-click. With Internet Explorer, you can do much
the same thing by selecting Tools/Internet
Options/Security/Custom Level. Checking the "Warn
before accepting cookies" box does give you the option to
accept cookies only from sites you trust, but gets really
annoying after a while.
Other choices….
Another idea is to make your cookies file readonly. This will prevent any new cookies from
being written to your hard disk, while allowing
cookies to function normally during a single
browser session. So you could still use online
shopping sites, but you'd miss out on the ability to
use customization features at sites like Yahoo.
Deleting your cookies file(s) after closing your
browser would have pretty much the same effect.