What is a Cookie?

A cookie is a text-only string that gets entered into the memory of your browser. This is a value of a variable that a website sets. If the lifetime of this value is set to be longer than the time you spend at that site, then this string is saved to file for future reference. Such elements known as "cookies" are used by your browser whenever the saved text string is required by the webpage that you are currently visiting, enhancing browsing performance and ease of navigation.

There are many reasons a given site would wish to use cookies. Many of the websites that choose this method are targeting to personalize information, to offer special features to some of its users or to even store personal or even private information such as name, location, gender, age, sex and so on, rendering the use of cookies some times dangerous for your privacy.

Are cookies dangerous?

A cookie alone is not dangerous to your computer. It cannot be used as a virus; it cannot access your information storage devices and is dropped by the browser when needed. On the other hand, revealing any kind of information can lead to the spread and unauthorized access to that information. While technology improved the quality of our life, each use of a new generation type of technology brings us closer to a loss of privacy.

Because the use of cookies can be disabled in mostly all the widely used browsers, their acceptance is sometimes required for even being able to visit some website resources. This is why some way or the other you must face the threat of security breach and privacy loss, of you personal information being sometimes harvested and stored for later usage of possibly unauthorized 3 rd parties marketing companies. But in the same time, many sites use a cookie to keep track of your settings on their servers, and to help you log in to their site. If you lose your cookie, that site cannot recall your settings for you to use. So the use of cookies is both a very good technology but like mostly all technologies it has its own security floors and drawbacks.

How did I get a cookie if I never visited that site?

A server cannot set a cookie for a domain that it isn't a member of. However, almost every Web user has gotten a cookie from a website even he has never visited that web resource. This is because of the ingenious techniques employed by advertising companies. Such an example is that most websites do not keep their advertisements locally. In exchange, they hire other ad vendors that place those ads for them. This is accomplished via a HTML redirect to the media service. When a page is requested, it is assembled through many HTTP requests by the browser. First, there is a request for the HTML itself and then everything the HTML needs is requested including images, sounds, and whatever additional components the requested web resource may use.

The call to the media service is an HTTP request for an image. Once the request is made to the media service, it can return more than just an ad. It can also return a cookie. Or, if it has given the user a cookie previously, it can read that first, and check to see what ad to send. The net result is that the user gets a cookie from the web resource without ever having visited that respective address.
Such usage of cookies is extremely spread and has led to many opinions regarding cookies and user privacy.

What can I do to protect from this privacy threat?

A simple and efficient way to protect against privacy theft by cookies is the day to day usage of 1ClickSpyClean, the only true active protection against such threats. With one simple click you can turn your computer into a safe working environment, rendering all unauthorized private data harvesting entities useless or quarantined.

You can easily see what cookies are already placed on your system and manage them with the ease of just a couple of clicks. Legitimate cookies and possible data harvesting ones are displayed in the same panel, with the user advantage of cookies that should be deleted being nicely colored in red, for better spotting and processing. The detection database of such threats is widely updated and kept under pressure for the best protection that a commercial product could ever bring.

Full time support and customer service is always available for all 1ClickSpyClean customers, bringing the advice of world's best security professionals to you in the shortest time possible.

Secure PC Solutions Security Research Centre

"I recommend this to anybody that is interested in keeping their privacy!"
- Michelle Leach

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