 photo by Billy Brown |
Cookies are small formatted pieces of data placed on a computer's hard drive when an individual visits a website. The cookies are stored as a tiny text file and stores accumulated information about a web visitor. This small piece of text is a way for tracking valuable information and can serve many purposes that can be useful to website owners, advertisors and web visitors.
For website owners and advertisers, cookies track browsing habits which help better target markets. The information contained in cookies is very beneficial when determining how to effectively advertise to desired audiences. Web surfers can also benefit from cookies because cookies offer a high degree of personalization and enable the ability to store website preferences. As long as a cookie is stored on a computer's hard drive, information relating to previous visits are immediately retrieved.
There are also some downsides to Internet cookies. Hackers can use them to exploit and the user does give up a level of privacy. However users who delete their cookies periodically can experience both the advantages and disadvantages of cookies.
Topic Rating: 25
