Staying Safe online and on Wattpad

PUP# 5 ~BROWSERS (Part 3): Cookies

Cookies were first used in about 1994 as a means of getting a browser to remember stuff as the user moved from page to page or even from website to website. Internet pioneer and developer Lou Montulli coined the term from the idea of a fortune cookie having a hidden message inside. He called it a magic cookie and with John Giannandrea, wrote the original Netscape cookie specification. It was a scrap of text stored in a user's browser and/or onto a hard drive. When the user clicked something the browser sent the info back to the website's server to remind it what they had done there. By including a unique ID number in the cookie text, the website could also recognise the user's preferences and browser setup when they revisited. It wasn't always sinister – for instance, if a user put a product into a shopping basket, without cookies the product would disappear when the user left the page to go look for another product. The browser would forget what the user added before, when they returned. Indeed, if we clear the cookies manually after placing a product in an online shopping trolley today, that product will still disappear from our trolley. Cookies were like a waitress's notebook, recording what we wanted from the website's menu. They are used for authentication so our user name appears automatically in the log-in screen; they help keep scores in online games, remind the website what we looked at, what we did during our session, and more. After a while, like the waitress, website learned what we liked and disliked on its pages and began remembering our regular requests and habits by putting it in a log file. This is when advertisers started smelling a money opportunity.

The user didn't know this little file was ending up on their computer though until the Financial Times published an article about them in 1996. After that, the privacy implications became clear. The cookie is not an executable programme like a virus or app but it can be set and read by others, which means it can become spyware if it's misused. Cookies were soon ubiquitous, some completely unnecessary, and for a while users could refuse them without affecting a website's operation. Inevitably, the advertisers moved in and cookies became more sophisticated. A modern website may average 17 cookies while big websites like WP will set over a hundred.

Once a website achieved stunning popularity (over 100k users) an advertiser would offer it huge sums to make some of these cookies remember stuff about user behaviour and even identify users and their preferences. This is when cookies became a real PUP.

A cookie potentially has your unique ID, info on your set-up, personal details, preferences and browsing habits. If you took that cookie and pasted it into someone else's computer they could pretend to be you when they visited the site it came from. Imagine if someone could do that (they can) and consider getting rid of any lingering cookies ASAP.

They exist in the following formats these days, although many of them are interchangeable:

First Party or Host Cookie

This is the cookie set by the website you are visiting. It can only be read by them and isn't normally able to track your movements. If the website collects info to sell on it can use the info the cookie returns to them, but they have to mention they're doing this in their privacy policy (that no one reads) in most free countries.

Many browsers will display what cookies the website is setting, but some cookies are not always picked up. The Cookiepedia website has a tool that scans any website address you enter into its search box and will give you a breakdown of the website's cookies. It tells you every cookie a website uses, what type it is, how long it lasts and even what it does, in some cases, except the mysterious 'unknown' cookie. It's cool.

See Cookiepedia's cookie checker in comment box below

Session cookie

This is the least harmful cookie and just remembers what we do on a site. It exists in the browser's temporary memory and is normally deleted when we close it, although some can hang on.