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The Risks of Cookies
by Marc Slayton 3 Jan 1996

Marc Slayton is HotWired's webmaster. He's a highly skilled breakdancer.

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Not long ago, I wrote an article explaining how cookies work; I wasn't really prepared for the amount of mail I received in response. After reading through several pieces of insightful commentary and a few abusive rants, I realized that in addition to the growing number of Internet denizens who want to know more about cookies, there's an equally large faction who question whether cookies are a good idea at all.

One Geek Talk reader summed up the cookie debate like this:

Imagine you're at home eating a TV dinner you just purchased from your local grocery. Suddenly a sly-looking store clerk appears in your dining room window and starts taking pictures of you.

"Hey, buddy!" you complain, angrily pointing at the camera. "What gives you the right to come in here with that thing? This is private property."

"Well," he replies, "you bought those groceries at my store, you see - and we have a right to keep our shelves stocked with the latest in popular consumer products. It's for your own good, you understand." He grins, and continues taking pictures of your lawn, your bathroom, your bedroom, your pantry, etc.

Sure, it's a little dramatic, but I think it illustrates many people's fears. Anyway you look at it, cookies are used to track people, and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

When used well, cookies give Web site developers valuable clues about who's visiting their sites; this can help them prepare for the future and determine what appeals to their audience. With the proper cookie scheme, they can tell which demographic group goes where, and how many people are interested in a particular product or service. They can even use cookies to tell whether a particular column or advertisment is attracting enough attention to keep it around. For the maintainer of a Web site, this information can be invaluable.

On the other hand, personal privacy is a sensitive issue, and the Net is a place where privacy can easily be violated. If you've ever received an unsolicited email message, you know what I mean. It's a sad fact, but the Internet is full of organizations that abuse the trust of their subscribers.

But unlike email, cookies are largely hidden from the user's view, which makes them seem a little scarier. But cookies aren't the primary source for tracking users' movements on the Web. Just about every Web site tracks its visitors to some degree - with or without HTTP cookies. In fact, cookies are merely a slight enhancement to a tool that developers have used since the Web's inception: log files.

Servers store information about the requests they receive in log files. These files contain detailed information about every single request the server receives, including where the request came from, what time the visitor showed up, and what pages he or she looked at.

And there's more - any systems administrator worth half his salary can scan these log files and tell exactly how many times a given computer has accessed a site in a given hour, day, month, etc. Compared to log files, cookies only provide a tiny piece of added tracking ability. They allow developers to look at their traffic on the big-picture level and to recognize individual users instead of just machines.

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