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Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (3959)	3/7/1999 3:57:00 PM
From: Gary Sanders	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81846

Hi: Cookies can be used for snooping, but aren't necessarily used as such. They are a simple mechanism for a site to write and read small amounts of information on a user's system for a particular site. They are designed so that a particular site should only be able to read cookies that originated from that site (which doesn't mean that there may not be ways to bypass this security feature). A common use of cookies is to identify a user so they don't have to login with a login name and password each time they visit a site that requires a login. For example if SI used cookies, the fist time a user logged in, SI would write a cookie which had information that identified the user. The next time the user went to SI the SI cookie would be read by SI and the user's particular profile would be pulled up without the user needing into log in. One other point to consider is that a site only knows the information that you provide to it (i.e. registration information), where you've been on the site, and your internet address. If you use an ISP which gives you a different Internet address each time you connect as most do, the most information that a site can glean besides the information that you have provided to it is who your ISP is. They should not know any more about you as only your ISP would know who had which address at any point in time. If you have a static Internet address, the information that has been provided when your site was registered could be obtained. However having said all that, a site should be designed so that the use of cookies are not required if a user does not want them to be used. In the above case, a user that doesn't have a cookie would have to manually log in each time then visited SI as is the current case.