Curious about what cookies are? Are they dangerous to your on-line health?
The cookie concept allows web pages to sommunicate with each other and to save information about your session for later use, such as a later login to the web site. This is done by having the web pages write and read a file via the hard drive in your system. Cookies are typically used to save login information, passwords, account numbers and such.
The concerns arise because any web page can read any cookie file, even though it was posted by some other web page. In practice, this means that anybody, anywhere in thew world, can read through your computer and get that informaion.
The Cookie Central site has several very good discussions about what cookies are, how they came to be, and what you can do to protect yourself from their misuse. This site also offers a Cookie Blocker program that is supposed to keep the cookies out of your system.
A good discussion of cookies is the Cookies Primer page from the Electronic Privacy Organization -
Other sources of information and programs for controlling cookies -
A program that blocks both cookies and advertisements in real time -
A real time utility that can accept or reject cookeis as you surf -
Automatic real-time control of cookies -
A cookies manager that also other records your browser maintains of your web activities -
A cookies manager for use after an Internet connection -
And - be aware that cookies can be used for nefarious purposes - such as claims about $quot;stalking$quot; -