Surely in the process of using the Internet you came across the term cookies. What it is? In essence, cookies are a file or several small files that store textual information. They are created when you visit sites that support this technology.
How do cookies work?
Everything is very simple. As soon as the browser receives a specific web page from the site, the connection between it and your PC breaks. If you decide to go to another page of the same resource or update the current one, a new connection will be established. On sites where there is no user authorization, this does not create any problems. But if it is necessary, without additional measures, the resource is not able to “remember” the people visiting it and display information in accordance with the preferences of each of them. To avoid a situation in which, moving between different pages of a site, a person is not perceived by the service as a new, unauthorized visitor, cookies help. What is text information, you already know. And cookies work very simply: when you switch from one page to another, the server sends a request for data from cookies to the computer. With the help of them, he finds out who is going to perform such an action, and then, based on the information received, satisfies the request or refuses. Cookies are also used when creating online stores. It is thanks to them that there may exist a basket familiar to us, in which data on selected, but not yet completed products are stored. And it is cookies that allow these products to not disappear from it while you are browsing other parts of the catalog and placing an order.
What are cookies useful for?
You already know about several aspects of using cookies. What is this, we also managed to find out. Now let's talk about what else this technology can be useful for and in what cases you can’t do without it.
Surely you know that now the so-called "affiliate programs" operate on many services. Almost all of them are long-term and last for months or even years. Throughout this period, information is stored on the hard drive, thanks to which the partner will receive a percentage if the user who clicks on his link orders the service or product from the seller.
When working with visit counters, rating and voting counting systems, cookies are also used. What does this give in this case? Cookies are necessary so that the system can determine that the user has already clicked on the link or left his vote. That is, there is some insurance against artificial markups. There are ways to circumvent this protection, but for ordinary users this result is more than enough.
What to fear?
When working with cookies, it is important to remember that in some cases, seemingly innocuous textual information can be dangerous.
Cookies are one of the most important potential causes of online privacy violations. Why is this happening? Advertising sites always keep track of which ads a particular user is viewing. Cookies store data about which ads a person has already seen, track which topics are interesting to him. And while we are talking about cookies for a separate site, there is no need to talk about the leak of personal information. But if we are talking about large advertising networks, the codes of which are present on the vast majority of resources, everything becomes more complicated. So, thanks to the Google AdWords system , Google can collect almost all information about human activities on the network. And if on some site he enters his name and surname, it becomes possible to connect all these actions with a real person.
There are other problems with cookies. Mostly they are faced by programmers who write document code. cookies for different sites. Without first familiarizing yourself with professional sources, you can assume that logins and passwords from the site are stored in cookies. As a result, it becomes very easy to remove and use for their own purposes. However, almost all more or less serious sites store passwords and logins in the database on the server. Cookies are used here simply as a conditional identifier for the user. Moreover, it is issued only for a short period of time. That is, even if a hacker manages to access cookies, he will not find any valuable information there.
How to enable, disable and clear cookies?
If you decide to disable cookies, please note that you will have to enable them again each time you go to the site where it is required.
For Mozilla Firefox. Go to the “Tools”. Next, you should find the “Settings” item, and in it - the “Privacy” tab. Opposite to Firefox, in the "History" frame, you need to select the "do not remember" item from the list.
For Google Chrome. Open the “Options” by clicking on the button in the form of a wrench. After that, go to "Advanced" -> "Content Settings". In the window that appears, select the Cookie item, and then select the item that prohibits sites from saving data.
As you can see, disabling or re-enabling cookies in Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, the most popular browsers, is very simple. In other browsers, this is done in the same way, using the tabs "Security", "Privacy", etc.
If you need to clear cookies, it is faster and easier to do this not using standard browser tools, but using the special utility cCleaner. Before cleaning, you need to close all browsers, otherwise deleting all cookies will fail.
In general, the best option is to install one of the programs that automate the work with cookies. Now there are a huge number of such applications, they weigh quite a lot and save users from the need to constantly change the settings manually.