Anyone who is using the Internet has heard this word Cookie.
But do you know what cookies exactly are? Are they harmful for your system? Where
cookies stored on your PC? How to find out what kind of cookies a specific site
stored in your system? These are the question that I will try to answer in this
article.
What is a cookie?
A Cookie is also known as HTTP Cookie, Web Cookie or Browser
Cookie is a text file that a Web server stores on the user’s hard disk. With cookies,
websites are able to save information like user preference, site visited, etc.
on his/her machine. Cookies are small text files, and created when a user use
Internet browser to visit a website. The jobs of cookies are to keep track of
user activities, their registered login, preference and other actions. We can
say a cookie stored on your system by the server on the client side of a
client/server communication.
How they work?
When you visit a specific website, your browser stores the
message sending by the Web server as a text file. So in that way the server can
ask for retrieving the message when it wanted or need it. Let me give you an
example, when you enter a Web site that offers you products to buy, you may add
some products to shopping cart and exit from the site. Next time you return the
site you will see your products are still in the cart. Because the website uses
cookies to remember your shopping order.
As I said cookies are text files that given your system an
ID tag. The information is stored as name-value pairs. They can be read only by
the website that created them. A name-value pair or field-value pair is a technique
in data representation in computer science. In this way programmers are able to
extend the original code without modifying existing code or data. Some other
applications that use a name-value pair for representing data are E-mail and
Network Protocol.
The website stores a text file with ID tag for a specific
action like your registered login on your hard disk so you don’t need
to enter your user ID and password each time you enter the site. This text file
or cookies does not contain many information but usually they include the URL
of the website (the one that created them), and a random number.
Categories
Cookies categorized in
Session cookie
Persistent cookie
Secure cookie
HttpOnly cookie
Third-party cookie
Super cookie
Zombie cookie
Among these cookies Session and Persistent are the most
important cookies, so let explain about them.
Session cookie
This cookie also known as Transient cookie and it is deleted
or erased when the user exit from the browser. Session cookies are stored in
RAM and not retained after the browser is closed. They do not collect
information from your system and instead they save information as session
identification. They created when no Expires directive is provided in their
time of creation. The Expire directive tell the internet browser when it has to
delete the Session cookie.
Persistent cookie
Persistent cookie or Permanent cookie, is a cookie that will
be stored on user hard disk till its expire date or user himself delete it manually. Unlike
the Session cookie, this cookie collects identifying information about the user
that is why it is also called tracking cookie. These cookies used for record
user activities such as user preference.
Where they are stored?
It depends on your operating system. For Windows XP, they
are located in the
%USERPROFILE%\Application Data
And for Windows Vista or 7, you can find them in
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies
Select Run and type %APPDATA% to go to Application Data folder. Remember
if you want to see the Cookies folder in the Windows directory, first you must
unselect Hide protected operating system files (Recommended) in the View tab of
Folder Options.
But the easiest way to find them in your system is to write
cookies in the search bar of Windows and hit the Enter. You should know also
each browser stores cookies in different locations.
Are they harmful to our PC?
A cookie cannot be used to disclose your identity or
personal information because they contain little amount of information. Also it
cannot carry viruses or install any malware. But these days because of
increasing of competition in global marketing, it can be used by a spyware to
check the user Internet surfing activities and habits. Also social networking websites
like Facebook track their users by cookies.
Read more about how Facebook tracks its users here.
How to find out what kind of cookies a particular site store
in your system?
The best and easiest way is to search the word
cookies in Windows operating system, but I am going to show you a trick to see
what kind of cookies a web site stores on your PC. First of all the Fire Fox
must be installed in your system.
1. Go to Fire Fox and open your desired website (for example
Facebook).
2. Left-click on favicon icon on the left side of Fire Fox
address bar.
3. Select More Information and click on View Cookies.
4. Now you are able to see the related cookies about the
currently opened website. In the Cookies window you are also able to Remove a
single cookie or Remove all cookies.
For final words I can say that Cookies can help websites to
be more efficient and they let users to store preference, user names, register
products and services and customize pages so they give them more of content they
like and less of the content they don’t.
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