From Rob Cannon
Yarralumla, Australian Capital Territory
Fear of cookies is fast becoming the new religion of the Web
(This Week, 19 April, p 12, and
3 May, p 4).
Might I suggest that New Scientist
publish a hype-free article about cookies, explaining what they can and can’t
do?
A typical anti-cookie Web site will impress you by telling you which version
of browser you have or what country you are in. I suppose one is meant to assume
that such information came from a cookie. That isn’t the case. It is just part
of the normal chatting between a browser and a Web site. If I am writing a
program that dynamically creates super-duper Web pages in response to a user’s
query, it is very handy to know what type of browser is being used in order to
tailor the page for maximum legibility.
Your article on 3 May adds to the confusion about cookies by saying that it
is easy to gather information “thanks to small data files called cookies”. A
cookie is just one line of a file on your computer that contains all your
cookies. The entire file is not transferred—only the cookie corresponding
to the particular Web site is transferred with each request to that site. And
where, one should ask, did the information in the cookie come from in the first
place? Why, from the Web server of course. Whatever is stored in your cookie
file by your browser came from the Web server.
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Cookies provide a very convenient way for a program writing Web pages to
remember the user’s choices from one request to the next, and also one session
to the next. This would appear to be the big sin.
Cookies provide a way to differentiate between users with the same IP address
(computer zip code) and in that sense they provide an advantage over using the
Web site’s log file to collate information about a particular person. Such
information refers to what they have done during their visits to that site, not
what they have done at other sites.
