What Microsoft Say about Cookies
Microsoft's explanation sounds very innocent and even beneficial to the web surfer but did you notice the words 'identification card'? It's this identification bit that worries many internet privacy experts, and me too although I'm far from expert!
A cookie is intended only to be read only by the website that placed it but what guarantee is there that the company placing the cookie won't share your identity data with others, along with information about your visits to their site, and the interest you displayed by the pages you viewed? Several web advertising companies collect cookie data in huge quantities from websites that co-operate with them. They collate the information so that they can produce surfing statistics and sell this information for marketing purposes. This information can be used to target you personally with adverts they think you will find interesting. General statistics are not really a problem but it's the personally-identifiying data that makes this an extremely powerful marketing tool. All this generated from information gathered dishonestly in my opinion, under the guise of a system designed to help you.
Dealing with cookies isn't too difficult if you use a cookie manager - a program that will intercept cookies and stop them even getting onto your system. There are simple cookie programs that allow you to delete cookies once they have been set, but this is a job that needs doing regularly. You also have to know which cookies you can delete because you may want to keep some that allow you to automatically log on to sites you visit regularly. Internet Explorer 6 has a built-in cookie management system but it isn't as configurable as a good cookie manager application and still needs a lot of improvement. I suggest that you try Cookie Crusher, a fully configurable cookie manager that intercepts all cookies and allows you to accept or reject them before they are stored on your computer.
Cookies are also set by nearly all of the advertising banners that appear on websites. These cookies - known as third party cookies - are not under the control of the host website and therefore I believe they should be trusted even less. In any case I think marketing data gathered by third party cookies is likely to be unreliable because the advertising banners very often have little to do with the pages they appear on.
Third party cookies are much easier to deal with by using a built-in Windows feature - the hosts file.
The neat trick to combat third party cookies is to fill the hosts file with the URL data of offending banner servers but give every one the same false IP address - the address of your own computer (127.0.0.1 by default). The false address obviously points to a location that doesn't contain the data your browser is looking for, so it gives up without retrying and goes to it's next task. This means that the banner will not be downloaded, thereby speeding up web page loading, and with the main benefit that any cookie the banner may carry can't be set on your computer.
There are several websites where you can obtain a list containing the addresses of thousands of undesirable banner servers. Download this list, unzip it and save it as 'hosts' in the appropriate folder - job done. Websites will load more quickly and your cookie count will be a small fraction of what it was before. If you want to make your own list of dodgy servers there is a program called 'Hostess'. This handy application maintains a database of addresses and has the facility to write the hosts file for you in the correct place and format. Hostess has some nice features including prevention of duplicate entries, and it simplifies the addition of your favourite sites.
See my links page for software mentioned here.
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