|
What is a "cookie"?
"Cookies" are the recognition tags some websites assign to users when
they access the website or send information by means of forms; they
allow information to be stored on the users' hard drives.
Even though not everyone who uses the Internet likes cookies, due to
their ability to "help" websites record information on their users,
cookies are very useful tools for managers of Internet servers.
Cookies are also used by websites on the Internet that specialize in
e-commerce. In fact, each time you add something to the "virtual
shopping cart" (that is, the list of products you wish to purchase),
the web page sends you a cookie for each one of those items (it saves
the selected product in the form of a cookie). When you are finished
shopping, the
e-commerce website knows, by means of the cookies, what
items are in your "shopping cart".
Since cookies allow the Internet server to write information on the
user's hard disk, there also exist possible security risks. However,
it must be noted, so as not to raise baseless fears, that the ability
to save information is limited to the handling of the cookies themselves
which are stored in specific files managed by the web browsers. Therefore,
there is absolutely no danger of virus transmission or of your data being
manipulated by a remote system.
|
