UKking

What is the point of adding these to any given website?

In a way I can understand why corporate run sites add them, but that doesn't make them any less irritating. But what does the average Joe have to gain by adding tracking cookies to a personally owned/ operated site?

The common factor amongst sites that like to add these types of cookies to my computer are usually littered with ads. These ads are not small, nor is there just one. These sites usually have ads everywhere of all sizes and for all types of things, services and propaganda. I hate PETA ads...

My internet travels on any given day would put the most people to sleep so isn't as if I have anything to hide, it just bugs me that people feel it's their right to put their junk on my computer.

Hain

As far as I know, you can block certain cookies in Firefox, and I always have Firefox set to delete all traces of my web browsing at closing. It doesn't even store crash data.


Now if anyone knows of a Firefox addon that will delete internet data securely (wipe methods, preferably 3 pass minimum) I would be much obliged. I have searched for such an addon but none seem to exist. CCleaner is no help as the data is deleted when Firefox closes. If I set FF not to delete this data, CCleaner is not yet designed to delete all private data stored in FF, as far as I know.

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ratbastid

It's not the average Joe that puts those cookies on his site--they come from the advertisement aggregation service he's using.

I've been a web developer for over 10 years, since damn near before the web as we know it existed. MOST (like 99.9%) web users--including you, UKking--misunderstand cookies completely. A cookie is just an identifier. And it doesn't take up a lot of space (4k max, actually), so complaints about clutter and junk on your computer are a bit silly.

You can only set a cookie from a domain that you're actually requesting something from. If you hit TFProject.org, nothing served from that server can set a cookie for any other domain, and only cookies belonging to TFProject.org are sent to that server. I can't pass data from one server to another in a cookie. Impossible.

Now, TFProject.org can include an image on the page from adhost.com (which probably exists, but I just made it up for this example). Ad Host, Inc, has brazilians of clients, each of which have an image tag on their pages requesting an image from adhost.com. When your browser requests that image, it (probably) includes the "referer" (yes, it's misspelled) field--the URL of the page that included the image tag.

So they send you a cookie from adhost.com the first time you downloaded one of their ads. They've now got a record of a user (no identifying data on that user, of course, except their made-up unique cookie ID) and the URL that user viewed an Ad Host, Inc ad on. Then next time you hit one of the brazilians of Ad Host, Inc clients, they get the URL of the referring page AND your unique cookie ID. Hey, NOW they've got something! They know some random person hit TWO of their client's pages, and they know WHICH pages those are, because they got back the same unique cookie ID they sent you on your first hit of one of their ads!

If this is starting to sound like identity theft, you're paranoid.

After a while, they can build up a pretty decent sense of what sort of content that anonymous web surfer is interested in. So they can start sending ads that said surfer might be more likely to respond to--things he or she or it (might be a robot or a pet cat clicking the mouse at random, they have no idea) is interested in.

So that's the point. Ad targeting. Nothing sinister. They can't identify YOU at all. They can only watch you hit URLs they already know about.

Also, note PLEASE that this is one fairly specialized use of cookies. They're vastly more commonly used for mundane things like web traffic statistics tracking and user session management.

Cookies are HARMLESS. Don't be a hater.

MikeSty

That was an excellent primer on browser cookies. Thanks

Albeit I've still had some weird site updating issues that were fixed by clearing cookies ...

ratbastid

That had to do with the code updating the site being confused about the state of your browsing session. Poor server-side code, sounds like. Don't blame cookies for that.

This cookie paranoia... It's like... You know, to build a gallows or a guillotine or a gas chamber, you have to use a hammer. So now hammers are evil? No, a hammer is a tool that can be put to many many purposes. Cookies are a tool (that have some very security-conscious user-centric developer-curtailing limitations built in) that can be used for purposes that perhaps make some people a touch uncomfortable, but mostly they're completely harmless.

ktspktsp

Indeed. For instance, if you go to a website and click on a setting (say, on cnn.com, select "International edition" instead of "US edition" so that you always get the international news on the front page when you access that site), that setting is saved in the cookie. That's because the website does not know who you are, and therefore cannot save that setting in its own database as it has nothing to identify you with (except an IP address, but that's not a reliable way, since multiple machines can show the same IP address to the server, and since you're not tied to the same IP address on one machine, especially if you have a laptop and take it around with you).

So the only place it can be stored is in your computer, on a text file managed by your browser. In it there will be a setting, "Edition=International", for instance. So the next time you go to the site, it will ask your browser if there is a cookie for it, and if so, it will read it and apply that user-determined setting.

/used to be an application developer, but I've been a web developer for the last year and a half