Internet cookies

Cookie!

No, not the delicious, rich and crunchy piece of deliciousness that first come up to our mind when we hear that term ( I guess my blog title already spoiled it). I'm referring to the Internet cookies, which are little documents that store information about users and their preferences. These data could be accessed by either the client computer or the website saving the information to the cookie. For example, if you visit a website for the first time, and choose your language preference as English, this piece of information would be saved to the cookie on your home computer. Then, the next time your returns to that website, it would automatically retrieve the data from the cookie and display texts in English, saving you from the hassle of having to choose the language again. 

Cookies can contain any type of information that the creator of the site decides to save, from the username you entered, the time you visited the website, the links you clicked on and the items you want to add to the shopping basket. After the website is loaded, a writing operation to save data to cookies would be evoked by some kind of user actions, like pressing a submit button. If the user “has elected to disable cookies then the write operation will fail” (1).This is a simple, yet effective way to store data — websites can tailor their layout and information to the user’s need, while the user would also save time and receive more satisfaction from browsing that site. 

Web servers quickly realized this potential, and improved the use of cookies by dealing with its limitation: size. Because the amount of data a cookie can store is limited, it could not keep up with the increasing growth of websites and data. Thus, instead of saving the data directly on the cookie, the website only stores a unique ID in the cookie on the user’s computer, which serves as an identifier for later visits. The main data, meanwhile, would be stored on the website’s system. That allows web servers to store an unlimited amount of data, and easily retrieve the ID to look up the user on their system through the cookie. 

Yet, cookie also comes with concerns about privacy and security. Advertisements usually utilize third-party cookies — one website you visited earlier that saved information about you in their system would send that data to other websites’ embedded ads, so that  they could dynamically show the ads you’re most interested in. This is why I often saw ads about the online clothing stores I usually visited while browsing Facebook new feeds. Some users might see this as a risk of personal privacy violation, however, since websites can “build up profiles of users without their consent or knowledge” (2).

Works Cited: 

(1) & (2) http://www.whatarecookies.com/