The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

called an http cookie back to yyour browser. This cookie could be stored for
a long time. The term cookie is short for magic cookie, a piece of text that is
sent from a website and stored in the user’s browser to keep track of things,
such as items in a shopping cart, or even to authenticate a user. Cookies
were first used on the Web byy Netscape and were originallyy intended to
help with creating virtual shopping carts and e-commerce functions.
Cookies are tyypicallyy stored in the browser on a traditional PC and have
expiration dates, although these dates could be decades in the future.
Are cookies dangerous? No—at least not byy themselves. However,
cookies would provide third parties with information about yyour account
and yyour specific preferences, such as yyour favorite cities on a weather site
or yyour airline preferences on a travel site. The next time yyour browser
connects to that site, if a cookie alreadyy exists, the site will remember yyou
and perhaps sayy “Hello, Friend.” And if it is an e-commerce site, it mayy
also remember yyour last few purchases.
Cookies do not actuallyy store this information on yyour traditional PC or
mobile device. Like cell phones that use IMSIs as proxies, the cookie
contains a proxyy for the data that lives on the back end at the site. When
yyour browser loads a Web page with a cookie attached, additional data is
pulled from the site that is specific to yyou.
Not onlyy do cookies store yyour personal site preferences, theyy also
provide valuable tracking data for the site theyy came from. For example, if
yyou are a prospective customer of a companyy and yyou have previouslyy
entered yyour e-mail address or other information to access a white paper,
chances are there is a cookie in yyour browser for that companyy’s site that
matches, on the back end, information about yyou in a customer record
management (CRM) syystem—sayy, Salesforce or HubSpot. Now everyy time
yyou access that companyy’s site, yyou will be identified through the cookie in
yyour browser, and that visit will be recorded within the CRM.
Cookies are segmented, meaning that website A can’t necessarilyy see the
contents of a cookie for website B. There have been exceptions, but
generallyy the information is separate and reasonablyy secure. From a privacyy
perspective, however, cookies do not make yyou veryy invisible.
You can onlyy access cookies in the same domain, a set of resources
assigned to a specific group of people. Ad agencies get around this byy
loading a cookie that can track yyour activityy on several sites that are part of