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Introduction To Cookies?
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In
the last year, "cookies" have become an
increasing topic of discussion in the online
world. A cookie is a small piece of information
written to the hard drive of an Internet user
when he or she visits a website that offers
cookies. Cookie files are extremely small,
comprising no more than 255 characters and 4k of
disk space.
Cookies can contain a variety of information,
including the name of the website that issued
them, where on the site the user visited,
passwords, and even user names and credit card
numbers that have been supplied via forms.
Cookies are supposedly only retrievable by the
site which issued them, and link the information
gathered to a unique ID number assigned to the
cookie "so that...information is available from
one session to another." |
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The Unseen Side |
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When you hit such
a site, it requests the cookie and take a look
to see who you are, and any other information in
your cookie file. It then sends a request to
"double-click" with your ID, requesting all
available marketing information about you.
(They're very coy about where this information
comes from, but it seems clear that at least
some of it comes from your record of hitting
"double-click" enabled sites.) You then receive
specially targeted marketing banners from the
site. In other words, if Helmut Newton and I log
on to the same site at the exact same time, I'll
see ads for wetsuits and basketballs, and Helmut
will see ads for cameras. If you log in to a
"double-click" enabled site, and it sends a
request for your "double-click" cookie, and you
don't have one, why each and every one of those
sites will hand you a "double-click" cookie.
Neat, huh? And you can bet they're going to be
rolling in the cookie dough.
The main concern is that all this is done
without anyone's knowledge. Some people may find
the gathering of any information invasive to
their privacy, but to the average level headed
personal, the use of this information is
harmless in itself as long as you know the
limitations of these networks, who is collecting
what information and for what purpose. On the
other hand, what right should anyone have to
collect information about me without my
knowledge, and why should they break my right to
privacy, you have to find the right balance
between these views. One of the main issues is
awareness.
So much for making the "client-server
negotiation more efficient", whatever your view
on tracking, the cookie protocol has certainly
been manipulated for this use, against its
original intent. Note that recent versions of
Netscape have an option to show an alert before
accepting a cookie and they also allow you to
block cookies completely, see the Version 4
update and the Stopping Cookies page for more
detailed information. |
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