Are cookies dangerous? Can they carry a virus or a malicious program?
Cookies are not inherently dangerous. Cookies are are simple text files, and can’t hurt your computer since text files cannot execute programs. Nor can they be used to view data on your hard disk, or capture other information from your computer. Furthermore, cookies may only be accessed by the server that “set” them. This makes it impossible for one Web server to snoop around in cookies set by other servers, gobbling up interesting bits of your personal information. Then why all of the concern about cookies? Although cookies can only be retrieved by the server that set them, many online ad companies attach cookies containing a unique user ID to banner ads. Many of the major ad companies serve ads to thousands of different websites, so they can retrieve their cookies from all of these sites, too. Though the site that carries the ad can’t track your progress through the Web, the company that serves the ads canand does. Tracking your progress isn’t necessarily such a bad thing. When track
