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Introduction to cookies
Far from the delicious little cake, the cookie is, in technological terms, a little text file sent by your server when connected to the Internet. This little file registers a certain number of information, which can be re-read and later modified if your computer is again connected to the server that created the cookie in question.
The anatomy of a cookie
The cookie is a text file in TXT format (it has the .txt extension). You can open it and modify its contents with Windows note pad, Word or WordPerfect. It does not matter. Should you open a cookie, you will see that the text it contains looks like an apparently incoherent series of words, letters and numbers.
What is the role of a cookie ?
W
e find it useful for…It personalizes your Web access.
The cookie does not only have bad sides. It is used by a number of sites to identify you quickly. For instance a free mail service like Yahoo, would have placed a cookie on your machine. When you will check your mail, it will show a personalized page with your user name. You will only have to enter your password to access your inbox. Another example, if you often access a shopping or auction site, you would have opened an account with a name and password. The cookie will help identify you and show your preferences immediately (with or without a frame or Flash and so on). While « shopping », the server will send a cookie each time you place a product in the caddy. When you reach the order sheet, all the cookies will be re-imported to the server, to show the chosen products, and finalize your order.
We do not like very much the fact that...
It spies on your Web behavior.
The cookie is godsend for commercial sites and advertising companies on the Web. It allows them to compile data in real time, that hundreds of marketing research could not give as fast. By tracking our surfs, they analyze our -conscious or unconscious - consumer behaviors, and target publicity ads better. Here’s an extreme example: you connect to an online bookstore, and search in the « science fiction » section. Meanwhile, the site’s server would have sent you a cookie, registering carefully which pages of the web you have visited. If you connect to the same site a few days later, you will find "as if by luck" an advertising banner promoting the latest sci-fi best seller. Magic, isn’t it ? Another application of the cookie is that by finding out the number of pages the surfer visits on a site, it gives the advertising companies the ability to change their banners regularly. They do it to vary the message to the surfer.
We do not like at all that...
B
y crosschecking nominal data, it could reveal your identity. The information contained in a cookie alone is not nominative : it identifies your computer’s navigator or its IP address (generally your access provider). Nevertheless, an expert in web security revealed that cookies of different navigators could be crosschecked with email addresses. So if we cross the anonymous information in a cookie with nominative data – containing a number of email addresses – we could find ourselves with a superb behavioral base, created for those concerned. And all can be done, regardless of the fundamental law of protection of privacy. This catastrophic scenario almost became a reality in the States last year, when the giant web publicity group, Double Click, acquired Abacus Direct, a marketing company, owner of 88 million nominative files of American consumers. Many complaints that committees defending privacy on the Web filed with the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), fortunately pushed back Double Click. But for how long ? The « suspect » was caught again, when last march, the Quicken site (personal finance software) communicated the financial data of their users to them…
