Can My Personal Information Be Leaked Out By a Cookie?

September 14th, 2009 by admin

To gain knowledge on how to prevent information theft in upholding computer security, it is best that we know more about cookies. This knowledge may be tiny and less exciting but we can gain a major understanding on how they operate and use it for our defense against security threats.

1. Cookies place in local drives details about your computer and settings. Let’s suppose you’ve been to a site before, in other wordsyou are a return user, and this is done with cookies. Other than that, it can also save specifics such as area codes used for periodic local weather reports from a site.

2. Internet cookies are created by a web site server to be stored in a computer storage at the time the user first enters a site. Later in the interaction between the user and the webpage, more cookies may be placed or altered.

3. Cookies are stored in pairs of name and value like “ZipCode,” and the value is “60119″ for zip code a user last entered in a web page query.

4. Web site’s cookies will not collect personal information about a user from a computer. The user may be asked to provide data in a query regarding his / her personal data, but a cookie can’t obtain the data by itself although the file was in the computer drive.

5. Although a cookie may save many other data, it is not capable of getting informations stored in other cookies.

6. You are allowed to delete your cookies on the computer by going into your Temporary Internet Files folder.

7. Internet cookies are also used for marketing. “Targeting” is intensely targeted marketing to internet users based on information (like past purchases) saved in their cookies.

8. There are cookies that can track users across the Internet, not just on one site. This technology was introduced by DoubleClick company.

9. In 2003, White House Office of Management and Budget illegalized the use of persistent cookies, which are cookies that stay active, even after a user has exited out of his or her Web browser. This kind of cookies are easily abused to bring in spyware and worms.

10. The small, 1×1 pixel cookies called web bugs implanted in banner ads are small 1×1 pixel cookies hidden in banner ads that store cookies in a computer when a user clicks a banner ad.

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