Exactly How do Cookies Enhance a Visit to a Web Site?

[Bruce Wrenn]

How many times have you gotten message that a web site uses cookies to enhance your visit? Also by turning off ad blocker how does that improve my visit?

[Pat Barry]

I always enjoy cookies when they are offered.

[William Adams]

Cookies allow a web site to store data --- some sites will use this to determine which parts of the site you've accessed before, or what features you might wish to have access to, or which ads you've been served and which search terms you've used on that site, &c.

There's a book on them: Cookies by Simon St. Laurent

There are a number of potential privacy concerns --- the article on Wikipedia covers most of that sort of thing.

Turning off the ad block will help the site to generate ad revenue to pay for bandwidth costs.

[Alan Rutherford]

There is nothing inherently bad about cookies. There is no way a cookie on your computer can do anything to your computer. The privacy concern is that any website can read any cookie, whether it came from that website or not. It would need to know what cookie to look for and how to understand the information in it, but that's not hard in many cases. You won't have passwords in cookies unless you're dealing with a very unsophisticated site but you might have the name of your bank.

The enhancements might be storing any preferences you selected or what sections of the site you were interested in.

[Jim Becker]

A prime example is Sawmill Creek. Cookies enable it to know what you've viewed previously so that it can only highlight what's new for you. They are also used for things like remembering your login information, site preferences, etc. For the most part 1st party cookies are just fine and not a problem. Disabling "third party" cookies does not usually affect function and helps a little with privacy, etc.

[Brian Elfert]

It seems like the reason you are seeing the cookies disclosure message on so many websites is because of the European GDPR regulations.

There is at least one major website that has a message that Europeans subject to GDPR may not use the website. I guess they didn't want to spend the money to comply with GDPR.

[Mark Bolton]

A prime example is Sawmill Creek. Cookies enable it to know what you've viewed previously so that it can only highlight what's new for you. They are also used for things like remembering your login information, site preferences, etc. For the most part 1st party cookies are just fine and not a problem. Disabling "third party" cookies does not usually affect function and helps a little with privacy, etc.

Yeah, Imagine coming to SMC every time and all the threads youve already read are "unread", like its the first time youve ever visited the site. Cookies speed up your web experience by making you not have to wade through the same old BS every time you come to the same site. Now of course they serve a bit of a purpose to the site(s) as well.. but heck.. the good outweighs the bad for the most part.

[Roger Feeley]

Cookies let web sites store stuff on your computer. So, when you log into a website and check the 'remember me' box to stay logged in, the website will save a cookie. The next time you visit that site, the first thing they will do is download all your cookies and look for theirs. If they find the cookie related to your login, they will log you in.

The problem with cookies (in my opinion) is in my second sentance above. As I understand it, a website can see all of your cookies in order to search for their own. A clever website can harvest information from your cookies.

Suppose you log in with your email address to a site that isn't very sophisticated. They might store a cookie with your email address in plain text. What a good website SHOULD do at the very least is encrypt your cookie so that other sites see gibberish. Other sites might just store an identifying number representing your login that they would reference so that your user id/password isn't in the cookie.

Then it gets a bit weird. Companies like Facebook are in the business of selling your personal information. They have your email address. So you visit some web site and they harvest all your cookies. They see that you have a Facebook cookie. They take your Facebook identity in the form of some proprietary string and get your email address from Facebook.

What you would prefer is to share only the cookie necessary with each website. At this point, I defer to others since I don't worry about this stuff too much.

[Roy Petersen]

As I understand it, a website can see all of your cookies in order to search for their own.

I think you misunderstand how they work. The site you visit doesn't rifle through all your cookies and read them; they will only be sent to the matching domain. The browser decides the match. Now I'm not saying it can't happen that some clever person tricks your browser into delivering them (session/cookie hijacking does take place), but it's not a common thing. A clever developer can make it much harder, but most don't, since they shouldn't contain more than coded bits to identify you to a program on that site, and not names, email and so on.

Companies like Facebook are in the business of selling your personal information. They have your email address. So you visit some web site and they harvest all your cookies. They see that you have a Facebook cookie. They take your Facebook identity in the form of some proprietary string and get your email address from Facebook.

Not exactly. As above, they don't "harvest all your cookies", as they're not given a list to choose from. What *can* happen is if you have a cookie set on Facebook, and later view a page that loads something *from* Facebook, then Facebook can access that cookie from that new site. This is how they track you; it's called third party cookies.

[Rich Engelhardt]

Also by turning off ad blocker how does that improve my visit?

The exact same way that forcing you to conform to someone else's agenda,...somehow magically enhances your safety..... ����
I rode my bicycle about a mile down the bike/hike trail right by my house.
I didn't wear a helmet. The tril is county owned & the ranger told me I had to get off the trail because I didn't have a helmet on.

Golly gee - I felt soooo safe riding a mile home , on the narrow & really busy two lane road.....but,,,it was for my own safety right ?