Understanding Cookies

This week in Principles of Computer Security class we learned about the different ways websites collect information from you while you are browsing. One of the most common ways are by storing cookies onto your computer.

Before this lesson I never knew what cookies where and how computers used cookies, but after reading http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cookie1.htm "How Cookies Work" I now know that cookies are not program but are just a simple text file that allows the web server to store information on your computer and then later retrieve it. The information is stored as name-value pairs which then help the web site determine how many times your computer visits a site and stores your user preferences such as the weather info for your specific city. The database is only able to store things you have selected from the site, such as pages you viewed from the site or information you have given to the site in online forms, etc. All of the information is stored in the site's database, and in most cases, a cookie containing your unique ID is all that is stored on your computer. This technology is also used for other things such as for online courses. To take an online course you need to allow the school site to store a cookie on your computer so that they will know each time that you log in. If they did not have cookies they wouldn't have an effective way to track "attendance".

Now with my new computer savvy I decided to enable a prompt on my computer so I would have to allow my computer to collect the cookie data to ensure that I wasn't storing tons of unnecessary files on my hard disk. I guess I didn’t think this through enough because I had no idea each site can  have 10-20 cookies it seems trying to retrieve data. From not only the site you are visiting but third party sites who want to store cookies. After 10 minutes I became annoyed at all the constant prompts and blocked all cookies entirely. This wasn't such a great idea either as surfing on the internet is virtually impossible without cookies being enabled. It really limits your browsing choices and sites that will allow you on them. One of these sites being Google. I couldn’t log into my  blog account (which I obviously need) without enabling the cookies. Instead of logging me in it gave me an error message stating that my "Browsers cookie functionality was turned off". So I had no choice but to enable my browsers "cookie functionality". So after everything I finally learned you really have no choice but to browse with cookies. The best thing to do is to accept all cookies and delete them regularly.