The Dangers of cookies

Many organizations use ``cookies'' to track your every move on their site. A cookie is a unique identifier that a web server places on your computer: a serial number for you personally that can be used to retrieve your records from their databases. It's usually a string of random-looking letters long enough to be unique. They are kept in a file called cookies or cookies.txt or MagicCookie in your browser directory/folder. They are …

…how to fertilize roses. More disturbing scenarios along the same lines could be imagined. There are of course many beneficial and legitimate uses for cookies, as Netscape explains. They also allow ``mass customization'' of the content on web sites. But it's not generally possible to tell from looking at a cookie alone how it will be used. Because of the possibilities of misuse we recommend stopping cookies except for sites where you really need them.