What Does a Cookie Look Like? An example of a typical cookie can be found in the Windows\Cookies directory. The cookie file looks like this: <user ID>@<domain> To examine your cookie file Right Click on Start and scroll up to What Went Wrong? Unfortunately, the original intent of the cookie has been subverted by some unscrupulous entities who have found a way to use this process to track your movements across the Web. They do this by surreptitiously planting their cookies and then retrieving them in such a way that allows them to build detailed profiles of your interests, spending habits, and lifestyle. On the surface, this practice may seem harmless and hardly worth fretting over since the worst thing most people imagine is that
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cookies are used to personalize Web search engines, to allow users to participate in WWW-wide contests and to store shopping lists of items a user has selected while browsing through a virtual shopping mall.
Essentially, cookies make use of user-specific information transmitted by the Web server onto the user's computer so that the information might be available for later access by itself or other servers. In most cases, not only does the storage of personal information into a cookie go unnoticed, so does access to it. Web servers automatically gain access to relevant cookies whenever the user establishes a connection to them, most often in the form of Web requests.
Cookies are based on a two-stage process. First, the cookie is stored in the user's computer without consent or knowledge. For example, with customizable Web search engines like My Yahoo!, a user selects categories of interest from the Web page. The Web server then creates a specific cookie which is essentially a tagged string of text containing the user's preferences, and it transmits this cookie to the user's computer. The user's Web browser, if cookie-savvy, receives the cookie and stores it in a special file called a cookie list. As a result, personal information (in this case the user's category preferences) is formatted by the Web server, transmitted, and saved on the user's computer.
During the second stage, the cookie is clandestinely and automatically transferred from the user's machine to a Web server. Whenever a user directs a Web browser to display a certain Web page from the server, the browser will, without the user's knowledge, transmit the cookie containing personal information to the Web server.
Explore. When the contents appear, go to Windows and then Left Click on Cookies which should display the Cookies on your system. It will have recorded each site you have visited.
The vulnerability of systems to damage or snooping by using cookies is essentially nonexistent. Cookies can only tell a web server if you have been there before and can pass short bits of information (such as a user number) from the web server back to itself the next time you visit. Most cookies last only until you leave your browser and then are destroyed. A second type of cookie, known as a persistent cookie, has an expiration date and is stored on your disk until that date. A persistent cookie can be used to track a user's browsing habits by identifying him whenever he returns to a site. Information about where you come from and what web pages you visit already exists in a web server's log files and could also be used to track a user's browsing habits; cookies just make it easier.
Persistent cookies are stored in different places on your system depending on which web browser and browser version you are using. Netscape stores all its persistent cookies in a single file named cookies.txt on the PC or magic cookie on the Macintosh. Both files are in the Netscape directory. You can open and edit this file with a text editor and delete any cookies that you don't want to keep or delete the file itself to get rid of all of your cookies. But remember - a site only knows what information you have entered. Not all cookies are bad; they can also provide useful functions on the Web.
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