A browser cookie is a file generated by a website that contains small amounts of data that is sent between a browser and a website. In the case of the Internet, the sender would be the server where the web page would be hosted, and the receiver is the browser that you use to visit any web page.
Its main purpose is to identify the user by storing their activity history on a specific website so that they can offer the most appropriate content according to their habits. This means that each time a website would be visited for the first time, a cookie would be saved in the browser with information. Then, when the user access to the same website again, the server asks for the same cookie to make the configuration of the site and make the visit of the user as personalized as possible.
Continue reading to understand how this works.
The common use of cookies is to identify yourself on a website. Users would be identified by entering their credentials on a validation page; cookies allow the server to know that the user would be already validated and therefore can be allowed to access services or perform operations that are restricted to unidentified users.
Other websites use cookies to customize their appearance according to the user’s preferences. Sites that require identification often offer this feature, although it is also present in others that do not require it. Personalization includes both presentation and functionality. For example, Wikipedia pages allow identified users to choose a presentation style to their liking; The Google search engine allows users (even unregistered users) to decide how many search results they want to see on each page.
Also, websites use HTTP cookies to streamline your web experiences. Without cookies, you’d have to log-in again after you leave a site or rebuild your shopping cart if you accidentally close the page. Making cookies an important a part of the internet experience (Kaspersky, 2021).
There are websites that use cookies to collect information so they can offer publicity related to your searches.
Did you remember looking for a product and in some websites appears advertisements for the same product category?
This works because cookies allow the detection of pages visited by the user in a specific site or group of sites to make the experience as personalized as possible, but in some cases can be scary, right?
According to a European Union report on data protection that analyzed close to 500 web pages, 70% of cookies are third-party cookies and track our activity to offer personalized advertising.
Cookies are not harmful; they don’t carry viruses or malware, and they don’t store personal information about you. But some websites may not be secure, which can allow hackers to intercept cookies and abuse the information they carry (Vasic, 2021).
Actually, cookies are only data, not code, then they cannot erase or read information from users computers. However, cookies permit the detection of pages visited by a user in a particular site or group of sites. This information can be collected in a user profile. These profiles are usually anonymous, so they do not contain the user’s personal information (name, address, etc.). In fact, they can not contain it unless the user has communicated it to one of the visited sites. But although anonymous, these profiles have been the subject of some concerns regarding privacy.
Despite the benefits of cookies in browsers, they can also be harmful if not used correctly. Below is a list of the most common problems:
Any device that is shared in a public area, and several computers used in an office environment or in a house, are used and shared by many people. Let’s say you use a public computer (in a bookstore, a cybercafe, etc.) to compare something from an online store. This store will leave a cookie on the computer, and someone may later try to buy something in the store using your account. The stores on the Internet usually give great notices about this problem so that care is taken in making purchases from certain places, even so, there may be mistakes. To check if someone has visited a site on a public machine before you, you can check it by viewing the history of the URLs, which will show a list of visits to that site.
Some websites notify the users about the uses of browser’s cookies, other websites force us to accept them in order to continue using the service – that is why they are obliged to inform us about the cookies, although there are ways to deactivate and block them.
People often use more than one computer during the day. For example, I have a computer in the office, a computer at home, my phone and also an Ipad. Unless the site would be specifically engineered to solve the problem, I will have like 4 or more unique cookie files on all the devices. Any site that I visit from all the devices will track me as a different user. It can be annoying to set preferences with all the devices. Again, a site that allows registration and stores preferences centrally may make it easy for me to have the same account on all of them, but the site developers must plan for this when designing the site. If you visit the history URL demonstrated in the previous section from one machine and then try it again from another, you will find that your history lists are different. This is because the server created two IDs for you, one on each device.
If you do not want data about you to be stored on computers, you can delete them in different ways depending on the browser. Here is list of step on how to delete the website cookies in different browsers:
As we have seen as users, we need to understand how the cookies work to protect our information in different devices, we can know if the website is using cookies when a notification appears explaining the use of cookies, also when the website has a car to store items, is common to uses cookies to make this features work or more information can be found in the privacy policy of the website.
Web Browser’s Cookies are very important tools for website development because they are great data matrix with information about users. Thanks to them, we can also improve the user experience in our web service or direct advertising to a specific group of potential clients.
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