Computing

A cookie is just a little bit of information that the web page leaves on your computer. It is used for simple things like letting the user know that this website was already visited in the past, etc. It takes the form of one or more pairs of key=value entries.

A website can read only the cookie from your computer. Nothing else. The cookie can contain only things that the website has access to at the time of writing. This includes data you type into the web-page if there is a form present, a date and time, what kind of browser you have, etc.

A web page can not do anything with the data it can store in a cookie, that it couldn’t do with the data if there were no cookies. For example, a cookie does not enable a web page to email your credit card number to people. If the website was capable of doing the emailing and had access to your credit card number (because you typed it into a form), it would not need a cookie to misuse it.

I guess what I am saying is that paranoia can lead you into not using your tools to their maximum potential. Be informed so that the decisions you make don’t limit you.