While cookies are delicious, you may have heard them in the context of computers before. Cookies are messages/ pieces of text that a web server passes to your web browser and stores on your hard disk when you visit an internet site. The web server can later go and retrieve the information, which can include content about a user's specific visit to a website (for example, items a customer has placed in a shopping cart), or content a user has volunteered about themselves or entered previously into a form (like a name, address, or credit card number). The messages stored on your machine are in small text files that include name-value pairs. The website that created the cookie is the only one that can access and read it later, and it cannot access any other information on your hard disk.
You can access and view all of the cookies stored on your computer by looking at the directory where a web browser holds this information. You can also manipulate the settings on your computer to have control over the process of websites storing name-value pairs on your computer.
The website How Stuff Works provides a good overview of how the cookie data moves:
First, when you visit any website, your web browser will contact a website's server for the specific page you are requesting. Your browser will simultaneously look on your own hard disk for a text file that the website has previously set. If it finds a cookie file, it will send this information to the server alongside the request for the page. If you have never visited a website before, you most likely will not have any cookie data stored on your computer for that site. In this case, the server will not receive any cookie data and will usually create a new ID for you, the new user, in it's database, and sends this information to your machine which stores it on your computer. The web server can alter the data it stores on your hard disk whenever you visit it's website.
Websites use cookies to remember what state your browser was in, gather information of how many people are visiting their site and what they are doing on it, to store user preferences or customize a site for a specific visitor, and more. There has been some concerns about issues with privacy and security that come with the introduction of cookies. The main issues are that some companies can sell your information to other third party companies that want to sell you similar things, making customer targeting precise. Also, some infrastructure providers, like DoubleClick, create cookies visible on multiple sites, gathering information about you from many different places and developing a detailed profile of you. These companies serve ads on so many sites, and it's scary to some people that they have the power to link these detailed profiles of the users to names and personalize the profiles.
References:
Content:
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cookie1.htm
https://kb.iu.edu/d/agwm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie
Images:
https://cldup.com/_d6DG7yyR8.png
http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Images/051807_cookies001.jpg
https://www.grc.com/cookies/browser4.png
This was super informative and useful. I had seen popups on websites before saying that they have cookies, but I never really knew what they were referring to. This was a very easy and fun explanation! Great blog post!
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I always laughed about the idea of cookies when it came up on my computer, but I was never aware of what it actually meant. After reading your post, I have a much better understanding of what cookies means and the concerns that are involved. Everyone who wants to go into the field of computing should be aware of the important information detailed in this post. Well done!
ReplyDeleteThis is such an interesting article! I've always seen notifications talking about how a website that I'm on uses cookies but I've never tried to figure out what that means. I think it's really cool how computer scientists program websites to do these types of things automatically.
ReplyDeleteNext time I see a pop-up window that says something like "enable cookies" or "do you want to store cookies?" I will now probably press no. I personally would prefer not to save that unnecessary information on my computer and risk privacy concerns. Thanks for the PSA!
ReplyDelete