What Are Cookies
Cookies are programs that Web sites put on your hard drive. They sit on your computer gathering information about you and everything you do on the Internet, and whenever the Web site wants to it can download all of the information the cookie has collected (wrong)
Definitions like that are fairly common in the press. The problem is, none of that information is correct. Cookies are not programs, and they cannot run like programs do. Therefore, they cannot gather any information on their own. Nor can they collect any personal information about you from your machine.
A cookie is a piece of text that a Web server can store on a user's hard drive. Cookies allow a Web site to store information on a user's machine and later retrieve it.
How Do Web Sites Use Cookies?
Cookies evolved because they solve a big problem for the people who implement Web sites. In the broadest sense, a cookie allows a site to store state information on your machine. such as
How many visitors arrive.
How many are new visitors. repeat visitors.
How often a visitor has visited.
The way the site does this is by using a database. The first time a visitor arrives, the site creates a new ID in the database and sends the ID as a cookie. The next time the user comes back, the site can increment a counter associated with that ID in the database and know how many times that visitor returns.
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