Internet cookies and the purpose they serve

Cookies are maintained by your web browser. Interestingly, cookies can be good, bad or malicious. Let’s have a brief look on the subject matter and its unique working:

What are cookies?

It’s a term, which is specially used to explain a certain kind of message that is given to a web browser by some specific web server. The key purpose of cookie or cookies is to prepare “customized web pages” and to “identify users.” Similarly, cookies serve you by saving your site login or information for your ease, so that you can easily login to that particular website next time.

Types of Cookies

There are three basic types of cookies, which are:

• Session cookies

  Such cookies are stored in the temp memory and they cannot be retained if the browser gets closed.

• Persistent cookies

  These cookies can be reoffered as permanent cookies. This type of cookies is stored into your hard drive.

• Malicious cookies

  These are used to store and track your online activities. You can also call them bad cookies.

What actually cookies do?

When you visit a web site, the server of that website assigns you a cookie, which is quite similar to an ID Card. Whenever you come back to this site again, your browser will automatically share or pass this cookie to the server. Ultimately, cookies will save a lot of time, as your web server will gather information about the most viewed web pages.

If you ever had an experience of some online shopping site where once you enter your full information, then you don’t have to insert it again for some other product. Luckily, a website, which assigns you a cookie, can read your information. So, it’s quite secure, but still there are some concerns on the internet. Even if you are accepting cookies, then it will not give access to a server to have some personal information about you.

Why you need to delete cookies?

You need to remove cookies to keep your system work fast. Mostly, when you keep cookies for a long time, it affects the overall speed of your computer. We all know that removing browsing history can speed up our PC and the internet traffic as well. On the other hand, deleting cookies and private data can also secure your privacy. Maybe, your PC is in use by some other people as well.

How to delete cookies

Deleting cookies is quite simple in comparison with any virus removal. You can remove cookies according you your internet browser. If you are using Firefox for internet browsing, then go to the “tools” menu. Then, click on “clear recent history.” Now, you can select the time range and then select “cookies.” Once you are done, and then click on “clear now.”

For internet explorer 8.0 users, select “tools” then “internet options” and after that, just click on “delete.” Then, under the general tab, click on the “cookies” option and then delete.

If you are a user of Google Chrome 5.0, then select “customize and control” option. Go to the “privacy” section and click “clear browsing data” option. Then, select the time frame and click on the “clear browsing data” option.

This is how to delete cookies according to your web browser. You can easily clean your browsing data in a hassle-free environment!