if you read the news every now and then
you've probably heard of cookies on the
Internet but what exactly is a cookie
when cookies were invented they
basically were little documents
containing helpful information about you
and your preferences for instance
imagine selecting a certain language for
a website you'd visit you tell the
website hey I'd like to view your
website and say English the website
would then save that information to a
little document a cookie on your
computer the next time you'd visit that
website it would be able to read the
cookie it saved earlier that way the
website could remember your language and
let you view the website in English
without you having to select your
language again pretty handy huh but
cookies are not limited to remembering
just your language in fact a cookie can
contain pretty much any kind of
information it can contain the time you
visited a website or it can contain the
items you add it to your shopping basket
it can even contain all the links you
clicked on a certain website much like
leaving a breadcrumb trail on the
Internet
a cookie can only contain so much text
but apart from its size the
possibilities are endless
what exactly is saved to a cookie is up
to the creator of the website you're
visiting now contrary to the stuff a
cookie can contain there are limits to
who can read your cookies imagine you
first visit the website we talked about
earlier and you tell that website that
your language is English this is then
saved to a cookie on your computer if
you'd visit a different website later
the latter wouldn't be able to read the
cookie from the first website in other
words only the same website that saves
information to a cookie can access it
since the beginning of cookies the
popularity of these clever little
helpers exploded and they gradually
evolved into a more complex yet
essential part of the Internet during
their evolution the amount of data
cookies contains started to grow at
first they'd contain just a few
preferences like your language and maybe
your preferred layout for a website but
soon developers realized that the more
information they could store about you
the better they could suit your needs
cookie started containing more and more
data and eventually started pushing
their size limitations subsequently
developers came up with a clever
workaround what if they would simply
store a unique ID in a cookie on your
computer and save the rest of the data
in their own system that way they could
save unlimited amounts of data the
cookie would simply serve as an
identifier for your computer much like a
dog tag by which the website can
recognize you and look up your data in
its own system this was the first leap
toward so-called
third-party cookies as mentioned only
the same website that saved data to a
cookie can access it later but one
website can actually contain bits of
another website these bits and pieces of
other websites embedded in the website
you're visiting are actually able to
access cookies they save to your
computer earlier imagine visiting a news
website
apart from news articles many news
websites contain a couple of ads these
ads are in most cases bits of other
websites embedded into the news website
now the news website you're looking at
may not have saved any cookies to your
computer and thus know nothing about you
but where do the ads come from it's not
unlikely that the ads on the news
website are embedded from the same
website as the ads on another website
you visited earlier in fact you may
visit dozens of websites with ads which
are all embedded from the same website
so what does this mean this means that
if the website the ads come from has
saved a cookie to your computer earlier
it can identify you and save information
about you through other websites so
while you're reading that news website
shopping for new shoes looking up cures
for a headache or reading the latest
gossip the ads on those websites can
identify you look up your information in
their own system and dynamically show
ads that you're most likely to be
interested in while simultaneously
saving information about what you're
doing online so is this a bad thing
our cookies dangerous that depends
really it is up to the creators of a
website to determine what information
they do and do not store and more
importantly what they use that
information for cookies are just a tool
just like a hammer or a saw they can be
used for bad things but they are
intended to be used for good things the
responsibility lies with the people
putting them to use cookies in a
nutshell to read more on
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