I was asked recently what all the fuss about cookies was, and why do we not just banish them? Whilst there are many occasions when cookies are seen to over step the mark and be too intrusive, the majority are harmless enough.

Have you ever wondered how when you browse a website, the ads on the side are so often relevant to you or even linked to sites you have just been on? Well the often maligned “Cookie” is responsible for that. Many people would say that the cookie is an intrusion into your privacy but in fact the Cookie is designed to give you a more relevant browsing experience and yes I fully accept that the marketing community do this so you buy their products but I personally would rather see relevant ads than irrelevant ones.

For those that do not know, Cookies are small pieces of code placed on your computer by websites that you have visited. Most are harmless and simply retain your computer’s information on file so you can access their websites easier.

However, there are cookies that do more than that – they collect browsing info and other data. Solid security software can detect those and stop them. If cookies bother you, you can always delete them with no harm to your computer. Just remember that when visiting regular websites, with cookies banished the site will be slower to open and will not remember your likes and dislikes.

Wikipedia Says..

A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user’s web browser while the user is browsing that website. Every time the user loads the website, the browser sends the cookie back to the server to notify the website of the user’s previous activity. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information (such as items in a shopping cart) or to record the user’s browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, logging in, or recording which pages were visited by the user as far back as months or years ago).