Take a Bite Out of Cookies
Protect your privacy and keep your surfing habits to yourself with proper cookie handling.
Cookies are small text files that web sites put on your hard disk to personalize the site for you or to track and then record your activities on the site. Cookies have gotten a lot of press—most of it bad—but the truth is, not all cookie use is bad. As a means of site customization, they’re a great way of helping you get the most out of the Web. They can also carry information about log-in names and passwords, which is a time-saver, since you won’t have to log into each site every time you visit. If you delete all your cookies, you won’t automatically get your Amazon wish list the next time you visit their site.
Warning
Cookies are big time-savers when it comes to logging you into web sites automatically, but they can also be security holes as well. If you use them to log you in automatically, anyone who uses your computer will be able to log into those sites with your username and password.
But cookies can also be used to track your online activities and identify you. Information about you, based on what cookies gather, can be put in a database, and profiles of you and your surfing habits can be created.
Because cookies can be privacy-invaders, XP gives you a number of ways to restrict how web sites place and use cookies on your PC. To understand how to restrict the ways cookies are used on your PC, you first need to understand three cookie-related terms:
- First-party ...
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