What are cookies? We are not talking about cookies that you eat with milk. We are talking about computer cookies. Yes! Your computer has cookies that are stored on your hard drive. Today, we will be discussing those cookies. We will tell our users what they are? What they are used for and many other questions that our users might not know.

Cookies are small text files that are stored on your hard drive. Cookies store information such as passwords, and settings on a particular website. Your browser doesn’t have any way of knowing who you are and that is why cookies are very helpful. Your browser looks at cookies and determines what your settings are on a particular website.

Cookies make it easy for users to use Internet since they store all the settings for the user. Sometimes when you visit a website you see your name at the top of the page and you wonder how this happened? This happens because of cookies. Your name is stored in a cookie and when you request for this page the web server looks at the cookie and determined that it is you, therefore, it displays your name on the website.
Cookies not only store personal information but they also store your online shopping information. If you visit amazon.com and you add three items in the shopping cart but you change your mind and decide to purchase the items later, next time you visit amazon.com, you would see the items already in your shopping cart and this is because all of this information was stored in cookies.

Some people fear that cookies are a way to get personal information such as name, address, or phone number. This is not true. Cookies cannot be used to view or get data from your hard drive. Cookies don’t open any ports in your computer, which would give hackers access to your machine. A website cannot find out your address or phone number unless you give your personal information. Nobody can use cookies to give virus or trojans on your computer. The site that put the cookie on your computer, only has the permission to access it.

Users fear that they are losing privacy due to cookies but this is not true in most cases. As mentioned above, cookies are just a way for websites to recognize you and your settings but there are certain websites, which can calculate your interests by looking at what websites you visit everyday. These websites can then sell your interests for profits.

Cookies are like a personal collar that is tied around individual’s neck. Even though good websites do not use cookies to invade your privacy but they can easily determine your ISP {Internet Service Provider}, OS {Operating System}, Browser Type, CPU Type and/or IP Address.

Cookies can be considered as creepy since they work silently and don’t give us any problems. They don’t even require our permission to get on our hard drive. We don’t really mind cookies having on our system but if you think that cookies invade your privacy or you are not comfortable with them then follow the steps below to delete them from your hard drive.

How To: Remove Cookies

Click Start -- Control Panel -- Internet Options -- Click on “Delete Cookies”

{Above directions were for Windows XP users, if you use other versions of windows you can find “Inter Options” in control panel but if you use Linux or Mac then you will have to dig around.}

Since you have deleted all the cookies from your computer you will have to re-enter your username and password. You will also have to re-customize everything on a website.

In Conclusion, we can see that cookies do not cause us any potential dangers. We, here at CoolTechZone labs, are very comfortable with cookies. Cookies make our lives easier. Imagine having to enter passwords for every single website. If you think that cookies invade your privacy and you are not comfortable then feel free to delete them. We hope that we have helped you by giving you better understanding of cookies.

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