If you’ve been travelling in the web world a while, you’ve probably
heard of cookies. No, not the kind you munch while surfing, but instead
the tool that makes it possible for a website to gather accurate
information about its visitors. This sets off alarm bells among users
about their privacy – but simple site operations depend on it, and
almost every major site uses them.
Let’s explore what cookies are and what the implications of them could be for an Internet user.
First, what exactly are cookies?
In April 2000, a respected newspaper described cookies as: “Programs
that websites put on your hard disk. They sit on your computer
gathering information about you and everything you do on the Internet.” This incorrect definition often appears in the press.
Cookies aren’t programs, but a unique ID number a site comes up with
for each person who visits it. These are called “name-value pairs.” A
name-value pair is simply a named piece of data. It can’t do anything,
or retrieve information from your machine or any other cookie files.
Think of it as your welcoming pass to get you back into a site. When you
visit and then revisit a site, your browser and a site’s server use
cookies to talk to each other.
What are the advantages of cookies?
Cookies solve a big problem for people who run websites. Simply put,
cookies state information on your PC and then share that information
with your browser to customise the online experience. Websites use
cookies in several beneficial ways for both the user and the site owner:
Cookies share data.
To determine how many people visited the site and which items were
clicked on, which helps site managers present the best choices of
material to visitors.
Cookies deliver a personalised experience.
To store user preferences and create more personal browsing
experiences, for example, by customising screen and icon appearances.
Cookies are smart.
E-commerce sites can create shopping carts and “Quick Checkout”
options, and make product recommendations based on previous purchases.
It’s important to note that all this information is stored on the site,
and not the cookie. The cookie can simply be described as your
identifying pass. Without it, the web wouldn’t be so easy to navigate or
nearly as intuitive.
Problems and privacy issues
But all this ease doesn’t come without bumps in the road. Here are some issues that cookies create:
Cookies don’t know faces. People often share PCs, so cookie preferences of one person’s account could be used by another person to purchase items on it.
Cookies are fragile. Cookies get erased, which makes it harder to retrieve preferences. This is why sites often ask you to register.
Cookies know more than you think.
In the early days of marketing, offline catalogue ordering companies
could share customer information to others who might want to sell
similar products to them. But in the online world, the information is
much greater: a website can track your purchases, the pages you read,
the ads that you click on, and so on. If you then purchase something and
enter your name and address, the site knows much more about you,
improving targeting, which makes people uncomfortable.
Cookies don’t follow you when you want them to.
It’s common for people to use more than one Internet device in a given
day, such as a desktop at the office, a laptop at home and a tablet or
smartphone on the go. It can be annoying to set preferences many times.
Cookies are always watching.
Some providers can actually create cookies that are visible on multiple
sites. For example, they can place small (1x1 pixel) GIF files on the
site that can follow the search strings you type into search engines and so form very rich profiles. By
linking back to name and address information, some providers have
threatened to personalise and sell the data. Most people regard this as
spying.
So, cookies – good or bad?
Cookies
are like any other tools; they can either benefit or disrupt those who
use them. But it’s not so much the tools that are responsible, but the
hands that use it.
It’s easy to see which cookies are
installed on your machine, as well as erase them, through the privacy
settings in your browser. In Firefox, for example, just select the
“Tools” menu, click on the “Options” then “Privacy” button, then select
the “Remove individual cookies” function before viewing the cookies of
your browser. This kind of transparency proves you’re not forced to use
cookies.
Yet, for most people, cookies are a clever way to make
your life more productive, your online experiences more personalised
and the Internet a slightly sweeter place to work.