“C” is for Cookie
The average web user has a pretty vague understanding about what a cookie, at its core, actually does. Personally, I wasn’t really sure prior to Flatiron, but I always had a negative opinion of cookies; mostly due to my lack of understanding. In reality, cookies serve many practical purposes.
In a nutshell, cookies store tiny bits of information in a user’s computer; such as your site visits, login credentials, and browsing activity. This information gets passed to the server through the HTML. This can serve many practical purposes, like making it so a user only needs to log in once. The information that gets stored can also be used, depending on the specific cookie, to store a user’s shopping cart, customize Web searches, and generate ad traffic.
Different cookies serve different purposes. For example, tracking cookies develop long-term data across multiple visits to a site. This can be used to help generate target-specific ads, and differs from session cookies which vanish every time a user leaves the site.
The disconnect in the minds of many web users is that, while cookies aren’t inherently bad, the information stored from cookies is sometimes used in ways we wish it wasn’t. Often, this information is sold to third parties, which is a major talking point in the debate on whether cookies should be considered a privacy violation.
However, cookies themselves are not the root of the problem. In reality, they serve many purposes that make surfing websites much more user-friendly and enjoyable. Yes, they are sometimes used to spread your browsing and shopping habits, but in the words of Scott McNealy, “You have zero privacy anyway.”
