All You Need To Know About Cookies and How to Handle Them

Cookie
You must have heard of cookies under various references. Here, obviously, I am going to refer to the Cookie that is part of the Internet. Lot of us do not know what it is actually and what purpose does it serve. You will know everything about it after reading this post.

What is an HTTP Cookie?

Before I tell you, why not see it for yourself? If you are using Windows XP, then it is pretty straightforward. Visit %rootdrive%\Documents and Settings\Cookies\ folder to view all the cookies. In Vista, type %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\Low in the Run (Windows + R) window to view all the cookies.

What you may see is a long list of text files, all having names user@some-website. If you open it in Notepad, there will be some non-understandable data written in it. So now you know how cookie looks. But what exactly is it?

When you visit websites through a browser, the website collects certain data about you (e.g. IP Address, HTTP Referrer etc..). These things are unique to every visitor of that website so it makes sense to store it in the visitor’s computer rather than at the server of the website. The file in which such information is stored is called a Cookie. Usually these information are encrypted so that no one can view it.

How are Cookies useful?

Yahoo! Login Page

Consider the Yahoo! Login page. Look at the option of “Keep me signed in for 2 weeks unless I sign out”. If you mark this option, you won’t have to enter your login information again for the specified time period and will be able to login directly. A real time-saver! How does Yahoo! (or any other website) do that? It is very easy. It stores the username and password with which you login in a Cookie at the time of first login. Now when you come back after two days and open Yahoo! in your browser, it will look for a Cookie on your computer. If found, it will get the username and password from there and log you in directly bypassing the login step.

But there is a risk involved here. If instead of you, somebody else visits Yahoo! from the same computer, they will have access to your inbox. Hence the warning, “[Uncheck if on a shared computer]“. So you should check that option only if you are logging in through your personal computer.

That is the most important reason for using a Cookie. By storing various other information about you, websites can understand your internet surfing style and other private things which you might not want to share. But you can’t really stop websites from tracking you and disabling cookies altogether is also not an option since they are needed by all websites to work properly. So take care of the following things to be safe.

Deleting Cookies

On your personal computer, you may not need to delete the cookies, but if you are on a public computer (cyber cafe’s) then do not forget to delete the cookies and cache after you have finished surfing.

In Internet Explorer, go to Tools->Internet Options. In the General Tab, click on Delete button under Browsing History. Then select Delete All to get rid of everything that you have done with the browser.

In Firefox, just press Ctrl + Shift + Del, select everything and press button “Clear Private Data Now”. Easy!

That’s all you need to know about Cookies. Now they shouldn’t trouble you anymore!