Hands Out of the Cookie Jar

Dear Paul:

Here’s a 4th grade question for ya: What are ‘cookies?’ What does it mean? Where did the word come from? What do I do with it (or them)?

Dear Tom and Patrice:

This query would stump a lot of people, even after the 4th grade. Here’s your answer:

A cookie is a digital text file with a unique ID tag that is planted on your computer every time you visit a website. During your visit, that website also creates a ‘matching’ text file, or cookie, and places it on its own server. These cookies are nothing more than paired identifiers that let the web site know which computer it’s talking to (in this case, yours). 

The upside of cookies is, speed and efficiency: if you visit one page on a web site where, say, you’ve entered reservation information to buy an airline ticket, all of your registration information is held intact when you move from one page to the next on the airline web site. Without cookies, you’d have to re-enter all of that information every time you went back or forward.

The potential downside, of course, is a potential compromise in privacy. Unlike temporary or ‘session’ cookies that disappear at the end of your session when you close your browser, permanent or ‘persistent’ cookies do not necessarily go away, ever.

This is great when you visit old web sites and the site’s ID tag knows all of your address information (faster forms, and so on); but it’s a little scary when you realize marketers can keep track of your web surfing and buying habits and start doing ‘cookie profiling, potentially forever.

One way to short-circuit this – go into your browser preferences and exercise your cookie control and ‘disable cookies.’ You may find web sites won’t let you do certain things without them, but at least you’ll know you’re not over-sharing.

And by the way, legend has it the word ‘cookie’ is derived from the phrase Fortune Cookie and is related to the hidden data inside each one.

I hope that helps!