Clients often ask how to protect themselves online from tracking cookies. Here’s a brief explanation which will hopefully help you in your future browsing:
First of all, what is a cookie? A cookie is not in and of itself a bad thing — it certainly was made with good intentions and for good purposes in mind. It is a tiny text file saved to your hard drive and its basic purpose is to simply “remember” you on the computer you’re browsing on. It’s what allows Amazon.com, for instance, to know your login info so that the next time you visit their website, you don’t have to keep logging in. That’s a convenience for you and makes it much quicker to get down to the business of shopping. A cookie can definitely be a good thing.
Cookies started getting a bad rap when companies figured out that if they could track your shopping habits through cookies that know what’s been in your shopping carts, they could send you pop-ups and targeted ads based on your previous browsing which lure you to their websites, thus becoming a financial benefit to them. That isn’t SO bad, but it could be considered spyware and is certainly an invasion of privacy.
The REAL problem, though, is that “bad guys” have developed malicious cookies which can truly infect your computer and collect personal information about you, then report back to the originator. They can be programmed to glean information such as credit card numbers and bank account info, among other things.
You could choose not to accept ANY cookies but many websites won’t function properly if you do that. The best advice is to clear cookies regularly — Open ‘Internet Options’ or ‘Delete History’ in your Internet browser and select the ‘delete cookies’ option. This removes the text files from your hard drive — keep in mind that you’ll have to log in with your user name and password to any Yahoo or Gmail or Amazon type sites you’d previously been logged into, but any malicious cookies will have been wiped out. Websites will create a new cookie for you the next time you visit — but at least you can stop them from accumulating your personal information.