Web Cookies

The popular rumors about Web cookies describe them as programs that can scan your hard drive and gather information about you including: passwords, credit card numbers, and a list of the software on your computer. None of this is close to the truth. A cookie is a short piece of data, not code, which is sent from a Web server to a Web browser when that browser visits the server's site. The cookie is stored on the user's machine, but it is not an executable program.

Whenever a Web browser requests a file from the Web server that sent it a cookie, the browser sends a copy of that cookie back to the server along with the request. Thus a server sends you a cookie and you send it back whenever you request another file from the same server. In this way, the server knows you have visited before and can coordinate your access to different pages on its Web site. For example, an Internet shopping site uses a cookie to keep track of which shopping basket belongs to you. A server cannot find out your name or e-mail address, or anything about your computer using cookies.

Normally, cookies are only sent back to the server that originally sent them to the browser and to no one else. A server can set the domain attribute for a cookie so that any server in the same Internet subdomain as the computer that sent the cookie will have the cookie sent along with a file request. This is so those larger sites that utilize multiple servers can coordinate their cookies across all the servers. The domain path can not be set to send cookies to a subdomain outside of the subdomain where the server resides.

This cookie allows the server to recognize you as a logged in user, thereby allowing you to use the features of the site. Without storing your information on a cookie, in order to keep your account secure and the service being offered by the server secure, you would have to log in every time you tried to do something: Enter the site - Log in. Click a link, log in (so the system can determine whether or not you should be allowed to visit the link). Without cookies, there is no "memory" of you logging in.

More Cookie Information

The following Web sites are just a few of the sites that specialize in cookie information.

Information about cookies in non-technical terms "How Cookies Work":

http://www.howstuffworks.com/cookie.htm

Cookie Central:

http://www.cookiecentral.com/content.phtml?area=4&id=10