Trilight Zone

[digital8]

Cookies are perhaps the widest-recognized privacy risk, receiving an inordinate amount of attention. Although they are most commonly used for legitimate, desireable purposes, in some cases they can be—and have been—abused.

A HTTP cookie is a piece of information stored on a user's computer to add statefulness to web browsing. The user is not explicitly made aware that the cookie is being stored. (Although some users object to that, it is not properly an Internet privacy concern, although it does have implications to computer privacy, and specifically computer forensics).

Cookies were intended to be retrievable only by the website that originally sent them, therefore giving back only data already possessed by the website. However, in actual practice it is feasible to circumvent this. Possible consequences are:

that a personally-identifiable tag can be placed on a browser to facilitate web profiling (see below), or,
that in some circumstances cross-site scripting or other techniques can be used to steal information from a user's cookies.
Many users choose to disable cookies in their web browsers. This eliminates the potential privacy risks, but may severely limit or prevent the functionality of many websites. All significant web browsers have this ability built-in; no external program is required. An alternative is to frequently delete any present cookies. Again, all significant web browsers have a built-in means to clear cookies; no external program is required. Some browsers (for example, Mozilla Firefox) have an option to automatically clear cookies whenever the browser is closed. A third option is to allow cookies in general, but to prevent their abuse.