Concept in Definition ABC

When we visit any web page, many times we are assaulted by a floating window that tells us that, if we allow it, said website will install some cookies at our computer.

The ubiquitous warning about cookies is a obligation legal of the websites that collect, in some way, information about those who visit them, but do not explain what these "cookies" are (which is what cookie means in English, cookie).

A cookie It is a text file that an Internet server leaves on our local computer to store certain information.

For example, have you never noticed the websites that ask for your name the first time you enter and, from the following, they already treat you by it? How do they do that? How is the server able to identify you? The answer is very simple: by means of a cookie.

The first time one enters this if you, the server checks for the existence of the cookie. If it cannot find it, it asks for our name and, by giving it, creates the file and keep it there.

From the following times we visit the page, when verifying the existence of the

cookie and to find it, it already directly takes the information of the name from there and greets us by our name (or whatever we have given it).

However, we can find that after a time (months), the same server asks us our name again. This happens because

the cookies they can have “expiration”, and be eliminated in a predetermined time. We can even define cookies persistent and non-persistent,

whose meaning is very intuitive: non-persistent ones are deleted when the user of an online service closes your session, while persistent ones last over time and are saved for use in later sessions.

Historically, cookies were invented by Netscape in 1994, already as a way to store relevant information for servers, on the user's local computer, and adopted in 1995 by Microsoft for the internet Explorer.

Just a year later, cookies began to be the target of criticism about their safety, and since then it has always been said that they were a weak point in the scheme of the Informatic security, as

their intrinsic safety is null (for example, they are saved in plain text, which allows them to be read by any), so they are easy to handle at the whim of cybercriminals to use them for their benefit own self,

and despite the fact that there have been initiatives to make them safer or to control their use more, they are still considered a threat to safety.

That is why many computer security diagnostic tools recommend deleting all the cookies present in the system.

A common use of cookies is in the advertising sector, collecting information about what we see on the Web and then presenting us with ads according to our preferences

It is one of the practices that we could qualify as "intrusive", but which are widely practiced by all kinds of websites and online services. How else would they know that you have consulted online stores for sport or computers? Doesn't it surprise you that after consulting the price of a computer, advertisements for the sale of computers of the same make and model or others of the same brand start to appear on other pages. competence?

The best policy with cookies to maintain our privacy and security is to accept the least possible and erase them periodically

Photos: Fotolia - ArtFamily

Topics in Cookies