Cookies

What are cookies?

Cookies are commonly used for the following purposes:

To keep track of how often you visit a site.
To save your login name and site password so you don't have to login every time you visit.
To store your billing address and credit card number.
To save a user profile so the site can present information customised to your needs.

Your browser enforces rules to prevent cookie abuse:

Cookies are limited in size.
They can be accessed only by the site that set them.
They must have an expiry date.

Crush them?

Because some cookies store confidential information on your computer, you may feel that you want to remove them. However, if you locate the Cookies folder (in my copy of Windows XP it is in the Documents and Settings/Administrator folder) and examine the contents of a cookie you will find it consists mainly of a string of numbers and letters. If you do want to remove them, you can simply delete their text files, or you can obtain a program that will automatically delete cookies for you. Some browsers can do the job for you. However, this may not be enough.

Some cookies are part of a process known as data mining. When you use advertising-supported software, some companies implant spyware and data miners to track your interests so that they can use that information to their advantage. They may give you a spiel about targetting advertising to your particular interests, but spyware and data mining use up some of your Internet bandwidth. In extreme cases, they may bring a dialup connection to a halt. Use anti-spyware software, such as Lavasoft's Ad-aware to remove them.