You’ve probably heard of them. They show up in an alert on most of the web pages you visit. You’ve probably also heard that they are a big deal. Today, I will answer a question you have secretly asked yourself once or twice.
So, what are cookies?
Cookies are minute bits (no pun intended) of information that are stored on a user’s computer by their web browser while they interact with a website. The aforementioned bits (still, no pun intended) are a way in which websites “remember” the state in which the user left a web page in a previous visit or visits. For example, cookies help remember the number of items in your shopping cart as you traverse an e-commerce website. Cookies can also serve as a record of a user’s browsing activity and remember information the user entered into form fields such as names, email addresses, physical addresses and the like.
Who invented cookies?
A prolific computer programmer named Lou Montulli coined the term “cookie” for a mechanism which allowed for the implementation of a virtual shopping cart. This all happened in 1995 during which Montulli was part of a team tasked with developing an e-commerce website for MIC (a telecommunications company).
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Cookies come in many forms and serve many different functions. Of the many uses cookies have come to fulfill, I would like to highlight a few that I deem important:
Session Cookies: session cookies exist while the user is browsing a website and are promptly deleted when a user closes their web browser. They also go by the names: transient cookies, in-memory cookies or non-persistent cookies.
Persistent Cookies: these differ from session cookies in that they are not deleted when a user closes their web browser. They instead have an expiry date set by their creator and persist until said date. Information from persistent cookies is transmitted to servers each time a user visits a website the cookies belong to or interacts with a resource belonging to the website on another website.
Authentication cookies: these allow web servers to know if a user is logged in or not and thus allow the relevant site to decide whether or not send sensitive information to the client’s browser. Given the nature of the information contained in these cookies, securing them via encryption is paramount as hackers can intercept them and and thus be able to acquire private information such as credit card numbers.
Third-party cookies: usually, cookies are created for websites that a user is interacting with at a particular point in time; that is, cookies are created for the website displayed on your browser only and not for a website you are not browsing. However, the proliferation of internet use has led to the rise of third party cookies. Third party cookies are created when a website features content from other websites such as advertisement banners. These cookies are then collected by the owners of the third party websites from which they originate to form a picture of how a user interacts with the websites over time. This of course has profound ethical and privacy implications.
