Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Cookies let you set up personalized home pages on sites such as Yahoo or MSN.com. And cookies can reveal more information about you than you realize. But there are ways to control them.
By JULES ALLEN
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 14, 2001
With a hearty "Hello, Jules" or Joan or Jim, Amazon.com welcomes you back to its Web site by name. And it's ready with recommendations for books, music and more based on what you've purchased before. You don't even have to sign in.
Thank cookies if you like the convenience. Blame them if you think it's an intrusion on your privacy. Scratch your head if you're like most people and don't understand what a cookie is or what it does.
A cookie is a small amount of text, sometimes combined with an expiration date. It's created when you browse the Web and ask for information, or maybe when you visit a site and look at an image, link or banner ad. Some cookies remain only as long as you're online. Others get saved in a file or folder on your computer's hard drive until you delete them. Cookies help identify you, or at least your computer, to a Web page so the application you're using will work.
But cookies go far beyond such technical information. They also can match you up with personal information that you may have entered on a site and is stored on the company's computers. Or cookies can match you up with your user ID and password so you don't have to log in each time you visit a site, such as Amazon.
For example, a Web site you visit gives your computer a cookie to identify it, perhaps with a number such as 1234. When you make a repeat visit, the Web site knows that you've visited before ... and more.
By matching the cookie with pages you request from the Web server, a smartly programmed Web site could determine that you spent a lot of time on financial news and that you bought particular merchandise. And if the cookie is part of an advertising network on the Web, the network may learn of other sites you visited, from discount travel operators to porn merchants.
Multiply that by all the sites you visit and you can see how an impressive (or frightening) dossier on your habits can be put together. The site, or an advertiser, collects that information and starts targeting ads at computer 1234's interests (or, much worse, sends spam e-mail pitches).
Though cookies do not include your name or e-mail address, it doesn't take much for you to give that away, such as by entering an online contest.
Even visiting a Web page may identify you to a number of companies that include its advertisers, marketers and partners.
If you're feeling adventurous, right-click on a page and click to view its source. Search for "http:" and see how many different servers have been used to create that one page.
Sites use cookies because HTML, the code used to create Web pages, is quite dumb. It doesn't know if you've visited a page five times or 500.
Cookies have become the poster child for the debate over privacy on the Web. Yet more than half of Internet users don't know what an Internet cookie is or how it works, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Once people discover them, they wonder what to do about them.
"It is beyond the scope of most users" to block cookies or take other technical steps to protect themselves, said Steve Dougherty, director of vendor management at EarthLink, an Internet service provider.
Blocking cookies also becomes a hassle. Some sites won't work without them. At the very least you'll lose the convenience of an online store that remembers your size or a finance site that keeps track of your personal portfolio. Or you'll have to click boxes at every stop to turn cookies off. But if you're concerned about privacy, there are some things you can do to manage your cookies.
Microsoft's ubiquitous Web browser, Internet Explorer, gives Windows users options including:
Disable, or block, all cookies.
Enable, or accept, all.
Prompt, meaning you'll be asked whether you want to accept each cookie one by one.
Allow per-session cookies that get zapped when you close your browser.
Not that these choices are easy to find. For example, in the newest release of Internet Explorer for Windows, Version 5.5, click on "Tools" at the top of the browser, then go to "Internet options" and on to "Security." Make sure the "Internet" icon is highlighted, then click on the button that says "Custom level." (In earlier versions of the browser, click on "View" at the top and then go to "Security.")
Make sure you change only the "Internet" settings and not "Local Intranet" or "Custom Sites." If you're not sure what you're doing, monkeying with those areas could open your computer to harm.
Internet Explorer Version 5.5 for Windows and its cousin for Macs also allow you to customize your cookie collection so your computer will keep cookies only for sites you select because you trust them or use regularly.
The Mac browser is a little smarter. If you choose to be prompted for cookies to keep or discard, it will remember your selections for future sessions.
Rival browser Netscape 6 works like the Mac Internet Explorer on all platforms but isn't ready for prime time because its results are inconsistent.
There are many freeware and shareware products that offer cookie control. Some of the better known ones include Guidescope (www.guidescope.com), Limit Software's Cookie Crusher (www.thelimitsoft.com/cookie.html) and Nicolas Berloquin's Cookie Monster (www.sharewarejunkies.com/Mac/cookiemo.htm). Some people swear by Internet JunkBuster (internet.junkbuster.com), but it's so complicated that it's designed for programmers, not humans.
You can delete cookies you don't like by carefully vetting them.
On Windows computers, Netscape stores cookies in a file called cookies.txt. Internet Explorer uses a folder called Cookies, and each file within it contains cookie information. Its location varies depending on which version of Windows you use. A quick search of your hard disk should turn it up.
On Macs, Internet Explorer users can examine and delete cookies by clicking Edit, Preferences, then under Receiving Files, clicking Cookies. Netscape stores them in a file called MagicCookie in the Netscape folder in System Preferences.
Cookies are stored in a Unix format, so editing them without special tools might be confusing.
The easiest way to get rid of them? Delete the cookie files after you browse the Web. You can wipe them all out, sort them by date and zap your most recent sessions or do your best to pick and choose despite their often unrevealing names.
- Times Personal Technology Editor Dave Gussow contributed to this report.
* Pew Internet survey, May/June 2000, of 2,117 Americans.
An Internet cookie is not a sweet treat, but its origin provides a tidbit of techie trivia. The term "cookies" comes from the UNIX operating system developed in the 1970s. UNIX used the nickname "magic cookies" for identifying files that attached themselves to users or programs as they entered different areas of a system. Netscape was the first Internet browser to use the technology.