What Are Cookies?
In today’s digital world, data is king. Companies would pay millions to gain an insight into your viewing habits, likes and dislikes, and personal information. One way is via cookies that are stored on the devices that you use to explore the web. Cookies help developers give you a more personalised web browsing experience like remembering your website logins, shopping carts, and more. Cookies also provide an opportunity for criminals to spy on your personal information.
Cookies
Digital Cookies are text files that contain small pieces of data such as username and password. Cookies are used to identify your computer on a computer network, identify specific users, and improve your web browsing experience. Data stored in a cookie is created when you start a web browsing session. The data is labelled with a unique ID to you and your computer. When you start a web browsing session the cookie is exchanged between your computer and network server. The server reads the ID and knows what information to specifically serve you such as content that you are most likely to view.
There are two types of cookies:
Magic Cookies
An old computing term that refers to packets of information sent and received without changes. This would be used when logging into a computer database system such as a business internal network.
HTTP Cookies
Also known as Internet Cookies, these are built for internet web browsers to track, personalise, and save information about each user session. A session is referred to the time you spend on a site.
What Are Cookies Used For?
HTTP Cookies track your activities to streamline your web experience. Here are what cookies are intended to be used for:
Session Management
Cookies can save login details, history, and preferences so next time the user logins, all their details are pre-filled. Browsing history is also retained in case you need to revisit a website.
Tracking
E-commerce sites such as Amazon and eBay use cookies to track items you are looking at to provide similar items while you browse the site and suggest recommendations in items you might be interested in.
Personalisation
Personalising a user’s browsing experience is the main way cookies are used. During a web session, you will see digital marketing and items that suit your needs based on your past browsing history.
Are Cookies Dangerous?
Cookies themselves are not dangerous and they cannot infect computers via viruses or other malware. However, cyberattacks can hijack cookies and enable access to a user’s browsing session. There are many cookies that users have to look out for when using websites.
First-Party Cookies
Cookies that are created by the website you are using. First-party cookies are generally safe as long as you are browsing a reputable website or one that has not been compromised by hackers.
Third-Party Cookies
Third-party cookies are more troubling as they are generated by websites that are different from the web page the user is currently on; usually they are linked to ads on that page. If a website has 10 ads, it may generate 10 cookies even if the user never clicked on those ads. Third-party cookies let advertisers or analytics companies track an individual’s browsing history across the web on any sites that have their ads.
How to Manage My Cookies?
Cookies are optional in your web experience, you can limit cookies that end up on your computer or mobile devices.
Enable or Disable Cookies
If you want a more streamlined and personalised web experience you can enable cookies within your browser settings and enable cookies.
Remove Cookies
You can reduce the risk of breaches of your privacy by resetting your browser tracking and personalisation. To remove or disable cookies you can manage your cookies in the browser settings. Upon entering a new website it often prompts the user to accept cookies to be used and captured, you can decline or accept at this stage. You can use ‘private’ browser mode in browsers to hide your viewing habits. Another option to hide your cookies, you can use a VPN to hide your activities. Read my VPN post to find out more.