Remember, cookies can be very useful; they are used to remember who you are when you visit websites and serve up relevant ads. They are also benign in and of themselves, text files are not natively harmful. But they do contain a lot of information about you and your behavior, and that is very valuable to, well, everyone. Also, if you're being good, then nothing to worry about, right?
Right?
If you're interested in seeing some of your cookies (or 'Temporary Internet Files' as IE likes to call them) in Windows you can navigate to the Temporary Internet Files folder on your hard drive, although the options menu in most browsers should give you a view of the ones you have. Here is the folder showing a few of mine, and it shows what your path would be, without the 'Darren' of course. There are other files in there, but the image is an example of what cookies look like - and they are *all* from sites that serve up advertising!
I feel like people have mixed thoughts about cookies, like you said it can be very useful but then again it does contain a lot of information about yourself. People may not want other people to have the ability of knowing what they do on the internet. Cookies can be beneficial when people are trying to monitor someone if they have done something wrong or what not.
ReplyDeleteWhen looking at the millions of dollars that change hands in advertising deals by companies that sell off your information, I feel that we should be a bit more protective of our cookies. Yes they do allow websites to make something more personal, but they can also serve as a piece of a paycheck for sites like facebook that have gotten us each to sign off our rights to the very information stored on our computer.
ReplyDeleteI really don't care about people gathering my information because I'm very boring and broke, but it's the advertising part that bothers me. These companies are making a killing off us and we have no clue.
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