Articals
Cookies: Good or bad
Have you ever been shocked when you log into your email account only to find you’ve been signed in automatically or that a website knows your name and email addy. Well what your dealing with is an internet cookie, these are files placed on your PC my a website you’ve visited.
This article looks into the advantages and dangers of internet cookies and also explains why most large website (including this one) use them, what they are and are they really a security threat. This article does not explain how to create cookies for your website but there should soon be a tutorial on it for you.
By itself a cookie is nothing more than a text file in your hard drive. There are many misconception to what a cookie is but to summarise it is a text file that a webpage can ask your browser to save to your hard drive so that it can come back and retrieve it next time you log on. Unlike some mis-guided articals you can read in newspapers written by people how’s entire knowledge of computing, web design and TCP/IP came from one interview cookies are NOT programs and batch files or any other sort of file that can be run or executes commands. This means that they cannot do anything to your computer. The only information that an internet cookie can save about you is anything you do on the website that places them on your computer.
You may now be wondering why web designers go to all this trouble to write the code to read and write them if they cant actually do anything. One of the main reasons is to try and enhance the users experience. They can do this by saving information about what you like, your favritoue colors are etc and them using them to customize the page next time you log on. More often they will just assign your computer an ID number that matches one on their database. They can then use serverside scripting to improve the webpage. This also allows them to get stats about the number of new verses return visitors they are getting.
If you have an account with a website they may give you the choice of saving your password and other information about your account that will make it faster for you to use and reduce pressure on their server speeding up the process for other uses and reducing their bandwidth bills.
Cookies can sometimes be not exactly dangerous but an invasion of privacy and they could contain vunrable information if you do thigs like internet banking and your computer gets hacked. If you put details into a website and they are saved into a cookie you could then become targeted by junk (e)mail. This is similar to when you buy something out of a catalogue and they have access to our details. However with cookies they have a lot more information about you that enables them to create a much more detailed and therefore valuable profile of you.
If your computer gets hacked and you have a large number of passwords saved in cookies hackers may e able to get hold of these and use them to gain access to your accounts. For this reason you should keep passwords for low security accounts (like msn) separate from important accounts like your internet banking account. However this is not much of a problem with cookies as this information in generally available to hackers if they gain control of your computer anyway.
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