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Getting a taste for cookies
Online preference files explained
By: David K. Every
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2002-05-27 00:00:00
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 or many Web surfers, the term "cookie" is tainted with a McCarthy-esque flavor and the bitter aftertaste of privacy violation. Some believe cookies are nefarious devices that allow evil websites to track everything a user does online, or that they allow access to personal information. Fortunately, cookies are nothing of the sort. Cookies are just preference files for each website, that can be stored on your machine. Cookies can't store anything they don't already know about you; and to know anything about you, they generally have to watch or ask.
Static websites are just files with a bunch of links that you click on to read other files. I call it the point-and-grunt interface; "Uh, me wanna read that." This works fine for many tasks, but the person behind the browser has to continually ask for everything they might want, each time they visit, because the site can't remember anything about the user or their desires.
When you go to a dynamic (smart) website, like Amazon or eBay, you occasionally do more than just point-and-grunt; you might need to log in, post a response, set up preferences or buy something. The cookie is a place to remember who you are, or your settings. And you can set things up only once, instead of every time you visit.
While a cookie (or website) can't read your mind, you may be telling it more than you think, and it can infer some things. So a site can be very observant and can adapt to you. Sites can see if 90 percent of your clicks (within that site) were on topics relating to bird-watching, so when you come back, it can customize things to show you pages or ads about bird-watching. The point is that by watching what your machine does, they can learn your interest.
The conspiracy theory is that if a site can watch you, it can spy on you, and share that information with others, and before you know it, your online hiking club will know that you bought viagra online. But the reality is that sites don't usually share information from one site to another, and don't really care what your other interests are. They want to make that one site more interesting to you, and that other information is irrelevant to that goal. And this is no bigger a threat than retailers or others doing it in the real world, versus the virtual one.
Cookies don't know who you are. A cookie usually remembers preferences by machine; so it knows what a machine has done, but not a user. If you and your teenager share the same machine, and both visit Amazon, the cookie/site can knows that machine is interested in both the Beatles and Britney Spears, but it can't associate which one of you cares about which unless you log in to the site separately and identify who is using that machine. And if you do that, then they know who you are without the cookie. If you go to the same site from home and work, a site doesn't know that it is the same person; again, unless you logged in. And in all cases, the information they know about you is the information you gave them. Even without cookies, sites can figure out most of this information -- cookies just allow the site to remember it from visit to visit.
Now cookies aren't always secure. You can often snoop the cookies of the machine you are on. So web-programmers generally don't put private information in the cookie; but there are a few idiots in every business, and these are who the privacy paranoids are worried about. But if someone has access to your machine, they can probably find out a lot more sensitive data than just what's in the cookie. So don't let people use your machine that you don't trust. And be careful about logging into websites from other people's machines; especially public or shared computers like libraries or college computer labs.
In theory, a programmer or hacker, can create a website that could try to "spoof" your browser, and read the information that some other site put in their cookie. But you'd still have to visit the hackers website to enable them to get that information, and there are "secure" cookies to prevent that. So this isn't a huge threat.
Credit card companies and retailers use your purchases to track your interests, not because they care about you, but because they care about the trends. I like the convenience this provides me. Salesman do this too; watch what you have interest in, then try to show you related things. This "spying" is not nefarious, and is basically what cookies are for; empowering websites to make themselves more useful to you. There are a few security risks; but there are more and bigger ones in the real world than the virtual one; so I think the good of cookies far outweighs the bad.
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