This what 'Hot Wired' had to say about cookies:
"Following the strange tradition of naming Internet functions after food (Spam, java,
cracker), cookies are unobtrusive little bits of information that slip onto your hard
drive, essentially without your knowledge, and track where and what you've done on a
particular Web site. Cookies are useful when it comes to sites that require
registration (the cookie stores your data so you don't have to remember yet another
password) or with configurable sites (the cookie is used to keep track of what
interests you most so the site can present that information first)."
AR says: they are mostly harmless. I allow cookies to be installed only to avoid all the
nagging that results from setting cookies to never accept. From time to time, I delete
the whole lot from the windows cookies directory (do not delete the index.dat file!).
They are time limited and essentially tell the originating server various things. For
example, storing registration information so that you don't have to re-type it next time
you visit that site. Or, they gather some kind of crude market research.
Ahmad
---------- Original Message ----------
>A quick question - hopefully a quick answer.
>What type of information is stored on those *cookies* we pick up from visiting
>certain sites - the BBC is one? How important is this information to the site
>owner when next we call?
>My uninstaller software warns me against deleting these though I can't see how
>harm can come if you don't plan to visit the site again. In fact I have
>deleted one or two and the sky hasn't fallen in yet.
>I've tried looking at one or two *cookies* with a text editor and they contain
>a lot of non-alphabetic characters. I know they're small, usually a hundred or
>two bytes, but I don't entirely like the idea of my hard disk containing
>information that is not intelligible to me but means something to others -
>presumably about me. Is this a way round data protection legislation?
>Ahmad, can you enlighten me, and perhaps a few others?
>Robert Upshall
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