Some Cookie Basics from https://www.howstuffworks.com
Marshall Brain posted on the website his own definition on cookies:
A cookie is a piece of text that a Web server can store on a user’s hard disk. Cookies allow a Web site to store information on a user’s machine and later retrieve it. The pieces of information are stored as name-value pairs.
How Internet Cookies work is by saving pieces of information like UserID A9A3BECE0563982D http://www.goto.com/ when visiting the goto.com
Goto.com has stored on my machine a single name-value pair. The name of the pair is UserID, and the value is A9A3BECE0563982D. The first time I visited goto.com, the site assigned me a unique ID value and stored it on my machine.
More aloborative an Internet Cookie can contain more information by visiting a website, for instance Amazon.com stores a bit more information on my machine.
session-id-time 954242000 amazon.com/ session-id 002-4135256-7625846 amazon.com/ x-main eKQIfwnxuF7qtmX52x6VWAXh@Ih6Uo5H amazon.com/ ubid-main 077-9263437-9645324 amazon.com/
It appears that Amazon stores a main user ID, an ID for each session, and the time the session started on my machine (as well as an x-main value, which could be anything).
A Web site can only receive the data it has stored on your machine. It cannot look at any other cookie, nor anything else on your machine.
The data moves in the following manner:
* If you type the URL of a Web site into your browser, your browser sends a request to the Web site for the page. For example, if you type the URL http://www.amazon.com into your browser, your browser will contact Amazon’s server and request its home page.
* When the browser does this, it will look on your machine for a cookie file that Amazon has set. If it finds an Amazon cookie file, your browser will send all of the name-value pairs in the file to Amazon’s server along with the URL. If it finds no cookie file, it will send no cookie data.
* Amazon’s Web server receives the cookie data and the request for a page. If name-value pairs are received, Amazon can use them.
* If no name-value pairs are received, Amazon knows that you have not visited before. The server creates a new ID for you in Amazon’s database and then sends name-value pairs to your machine in the header for the Web page it sends. Your machine stores the name-value pairs on your hard disk.
* The Web server can change name-value pairs or add new pairs whenever you visit the site and request a page.
There are other pieces of information that the server can send with the name-value pair. One of these is an expiration date. Another is a path (so that the site can associate different cookie values with different parts of the site).
By adopting het Internet Cookie by websites, a database is filled with things you have selected from the site, pages you have viewed from the site, information you have given to the site in online forms, etc. containing your unique ID is all that is stored on your computer.
How about Internet Cookies not restricted to the actual website you visit? These are called third parties Cookies. There are certain infrastructure providers that can actually create cookies that are visible on multiple sites, like DoubleClick. Third party Cookies can then track your movements across multiple sites. It can potentially see the search strings that you type into search engines. Anonymous rich profiles are created in your journey on the internet over and over again. This is not harmless, because companies like DoubleClick DoubleClick threatened to link these rich anonymous profiles back to name and address information. DoubleClick threatened to personalize them, and then sell the data as a business model. That began to look very much like spying to most people, and that is what caused uproar. DoubleClick are in a unique position to acquire other profiles and combining them with real life data because they serve ads on so many sites. This cross-site profiling is not a capability available to individual sites, because cookies are site specific.
This post is for reference purpose mostly cited from https://computer.howstuffworks.com/cookie1.htm visited on January 2, 2020.
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