Internet Cookies and Confidentiality
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Internet Cookies and Confidentiality
Internet cookies or just cookies are small text files that are used by web site designers to enhance the browsing experience by enabling quick authentication, storing user prefernces, and tailoring sites for individual experience. Although cookies allow for a better browsing experience there is much misguided confusion and concern regarding internet cookies by the general public which will be addressed below. Internet cookies are not porgrams and cannot collect data, surfing tendencies debit or credit card information stored on a users computer. However there are a some confidentiality and privacy concerns regarding internet cookies that users should be aware of when browsing the internet.
Definition
An internet cookie is a text file that is placed on your hard drive by a web server when you access certain sites. These text files can contain data about your login informatoin, preferences, and keep track of current shopping carts. The text files only contain information that the user has given to the current site. Sites that do not share specific domains cannot share cookie information, collected or access another sites cookie.
Purpose
Cookies are used for serveral different purposes when creating a web site. They are used both by the site developers for keeping track of how many people visit the site, how many new versus repeat users are visiting the site and how ofter peopel visit the site. This informatoin allow owner and developers to monitor the susscess of their site or parts of their site. Cookies can also be used to enhance the users expeience as well. Cookes allow webstie to save specific user prefferences when they browse, such as page layouts, visual designs and favour sections. Cookies have also allowed sites to implement shopping carts which allow for e-commerce.
How It All Works
Name-Value Pair
Cookies are all stored using Name-Value Pairs. Name-Value pairs are simply named pieces of data. More specifically each paiec of data a website stores has the form identifier=value. Examples of this would be NAME=VALUE which would be a unique user id. Any kind of information can be stored in cookies but there is certain information that most cookies use: <\n> NAME=VALUE is always used to identify the user. It assigns a unique identification number to each user so that the site can identify which settings belong to which users.
Interaction
Cookies are created by sites that users visit. When a user visits a website they first enter a URL into a browser. The browser then searches for any cookies that the corresponding website has set. If it finds a cookie for that website it then sends the request for the page to the sever along with the cookie. If no cookie is found the request for the page is sent without a cookie. The server then sends the request back to the browser for viewing. If the sever does not recieve a cookie the site knows that this is a first time viewer to the site and creates a cookie which is sends back to the user to store on the hard drive for future use. If a cookie is send the site will take the information in the cookie (usually a login) and applies it to the site.
