Quite a few of the sites you will visit on the Internet/World Wide Web use "Cookies." Cookies are in many ways similar to the intelligence-gathering done by businesses every day, among them: direct mailing list companies and database marketers of credit card users; companies that sell lists of things, such as individual addresses of those who subscribe to certain magazines, eat certain foods, drive certain cars, own pets, have children, like chocolate, are interested in Henna, or perhaps those who have recently cultivated a taste for expensive cigars. Hmmm, Big Brother is watching ;-(
"Cookies can flow right into your computer (they can start before you even see the page you are accessing), but (the good news here) you can choose to accept a "Cookie" or not. Most commonly, you can check a box in the OPTIONS/GENERAL PREFERENCES area of your browser to alert you to "Cookies". (see your own browsers' options menu to locate this feature).
Another reason Cookies are bad is that they allow Internet "junk Mail." A good example of this is a friend of ours who has AOL (America On-Line) and gets dozens of Junk e-mails a day. The reason is that he has had AOL for 4-5 years and in that time has always used on Windows 3.1 (AOL 2.0). Win 3.1 and AOL 2.0 had no provisions for guarding against Cookies and this ended up leaving hundreds of Cookies on his computer, along with the resultant junk mail. What can he do? Upgrade to Win 95/98 and also AOL 4.0.
"What about Macs? How do I guard against Cookies with my Macintosh?" you ask? Well, from what I hear (I'm not a "Maccentric") the file where the Cookies are stored is called "MagicCookie."
Now, after all the doom and gloom: Cookies also may make it easier and faster to reconnect with sites you have visited before, because the site can accurately know who you are; and perhaps respond more quickly with known preferences, menus or options you expect on their site. So, if it's a web site that you access often, then perhaps you might want to allow it--certainly never do this with a site you don't know!
To Find out more about Cookies and what they do (and don't do) you can go directly to Search in Netscape or MicroSoft's Internet Explorer at their home pages, for views on just what Cookies are all about.
Again, this Site (and ANY I do in the future) is declared a "Cookie-Free Zone," meaning that on these sites, we do not and will not (as long as I'm Webmistress) set Cookies. [Whoops, my Guestbook has a Cookie attached to it. It was the only way at this time for me to get a guestbook for this site] However, if you find a link that you wish to check out on our "Links" page and then click to that site, you may be entering a site which does set a Cookie. You may want to exercise your option to accept or decline the Cookie.
