What are cookies and what are they for? surely many times you have come across this word while browsing a website. So throughout this article we will explain in detail what they are and what they serve us for, so I invite you to continue reading.
What are cookies and what are they for?
Most of the people who are browsing through the Internet on certain websites, have come across this word on several occasions through a notice on the page where they inform that cookies will be saved in their browser. The vast majority of users do not give much importance to the notice and accept without knowing what they accepted, which is very dangerous because one as a user of these pages does not know the reason why they are storing this type of information and the use that they came to give.
That is why throughout this article we will explain in detail what it means when you agree that cookies will be saved when you are browsing a website. And you will also know that there may be a series of security and privacy problems that entails that you accept this.
What are cookies?
A cookie is a file that is created by the website you are browsing and that has a large amount of data that is sent between a sender and a receiver. For example, on the Internet, the sender would be the server where the web page is hosted and the receiver is the browser that you are using to visit any page through the Internet.
The objective of cookies is to identify the user by saving their activity history on a specific web page, in this way the appropriate content can be offered according to the user's habit. And which means that when you visit a web page for the first time, a cookie is saved in the browser with certain information.
And then when on another occasion you visit this same page again, the server will ask the cookies to fix the configuration of the site and provide the user that the visit is as personalized as possible. One of the purposes of cookies is also to know when was the last time you came to visit the page or to save the items that you placed in the shopping cart on the website, all this information is saved in real time.
What are cookies for?
One of the first cookies was created in 1994 when an employee of the Netscape Communications company decided to create an e-commerce application with a shopping cart that would always keep this cart full of items without requiring many server resources. This is why the developer decides to create a file that will be saved on the recipient's computer instead of using the website's server.
Cookies have always existed only that they had not been used in browsers before and from their creation several browsers began to apply them and that they accepted the use of cookies. As it was at that time Internet Explorer and NetScape who were the first to apply them.
What are the most common types of cookies?
Currently there are several types of cookies, but the most common are called session cookies because they have a very short lifetime and are deleted when you close the browser. We also have persistent cookies, which are those that are used to track the user by storing information about their behavior on the website for a certain time.
These persistent cookies can be erased by cleaning the browser data, which you surely have done on some occasions. But some have an expiration date.
There are also some so-called secure cookies that are those that store encrypted information to prevent the data that is stored from being victims of malicious attacks by third parties. These are used with HTTPS connections.
And there is one that is called zombies cookies that are created by themselves and then are deleted, which means that the browser has no power over them because they are regenerated, that is why they placed this Name. Zombie cookies are saved on electronic devices and not on the browser.
For all the aforementioned throughout this interesting article named What are cookies and what are they for? Where do we get to learn about what cookies are and what they do to our computers. And so that they get to collect this information from people's browsing data.
In order that you can access them no matter what browser you are using, which makes these characteristics a threat to the privacy of the users of these electronic devices and that on many occasions this information is used for malicious purposes. And that is why we as website users are aware of the existence of these types of files so that we are aware when we enter certain places on the web where they will ask us for this type of personal information such as browsing data.
We also came to know that there are several types of cookies and each of these have their specific functions for the collection of browsing data information. This is why we must know about these types of files because we are unintentionally giving important information about one as a user and that it is possible that this information that is collected through these cookies is used in a bad way.
That is why I invite you to continue expanding your knowledge of these types of files, so I leave you the following link so that you continue learning about Query optimization.