Cookies: What are they and what are they for?

[ryanm]

Initially, cookies were developed by Netscape to provide a reliable means of implementing a virtual shopping cart.

For example, cookies are used to store user preferences such as the preferred language for viewing a website.

But the main use of cookies is to store the session. The session is a basic concept in web applications that allows you to control user access to certain parts of a website and show you that user's particular information. Finally, there are also some problematic uses of cookies, such as tracking cookies, which allow tracking of a user between different websites.

Tracking allows you to know the websites that a user has visited, how long they have been on each of them, and is normally used to create anonymous user profiles that can be used later for different purposes, such as creating advertising campaigns based on user profiles.

chrome update

[Guest]

Cookies are created to identify you when you visit a new website. The web server — which stores the website's data — sends a short stream of identifying info to your web browser. ... These tell cookies where to be sent and what data to recall. The server only sends the cookie when it wants the web browser to save it.