Essay on Internet Privacy - Cookies and Internet Privacy :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

Cookies and Internet Privacy Student Jos Amador analogouss to use his telecommunicate account at yahoo.com. I find paper so obsolete, he says. Amador is not worried about the privacy of this account. Perhaps he and the many an(prenominal) other people that use yahoo email should be concerned, however. each users of Yahoo mail are having their actions tracked. Yahoo monitors the actions of users, in part, by utilize cookies. Cookies are small cross-files that record visits to web pages. When you open up a cookie dispensing web page, the web server sends single or to a greater extent of these files to your browser. The cookies ordain usually contain a number that is unique to that browser. and then the next time that this browser opens that particular page, the web turn up will both send a new cookie and retrieve the obsolete one. This makes it possible, for sites to compile lists of how often visitors go to a particular page as well as when they visit it. By themselves, cookies cannot reveal the identity of the user. each these files can do is store information about domain name calling and the rough location of the visitor. That said, if the site requires registration and a sign in -as is the case with yahoo email, for example- then site administrators can combine the cardinal streams of data with ease. Cookies also cannot send viruses. They are only text files so preventing that danger. Readers who want to view the cookies stored on their browser should search for a file called on cookies.txt on PCs or a file called MagicCookie on Macs. The rootage browser that could handle cookies was Netscape Navigator 1.0. Cookies have become commonplace on the web since that browser first came out in 1995. By one account, 26 of the top 100 web sites utilize these files. Sites that use cookies take AltaVista, all pages on the GeoCities domain, and the web version of the New York times. The New York Times is a lot like Yahoo mail in that the acceptance of cookies is required. Most sites, however, do not require browsers to accept cookies. Web site administrators say that the primary purpose of cookies is not to track Internet surfriding habits. Rather they argue that cookies allow users to customize their experiences on the web. Services like My Yahoo would not work nearly as smoothly without cookies.