Cookies.
Information about cookies.
What are cookies?
What are the Dangers and Benefits of cookies?
While cookies provide a variety of benefits to Web users, they also present two primary risks to consumers. ,
Do you really want a company or government agency to know where you've been and what you've done online? Some "What ifs" to consider...
What if you did a lot of research on a private medical condition?
What if you did a lot of research on loopholes in drug laws?
What if you researched child pornography in an effort to develop prevention methods?
What is adware and spyware?
Adware is any software application in which advertising banners are displayed while the program is running. The authors of these applications include additional code that delivers the ads, which can be viewed through pop-up windows or through a bar that appears on a computer screen. The justification for adware is that it helps recover programming development cost and helps to hold down the cost for the user. Adware has been criticized for occasionally including code that tracks a user's personal information and passes it on to third parties, without the user's authorization or knowledge. This practice has been dubbed spyware and has prompted an outcry from computer security and privacy advocates.
On the Internet, spyware is programming that is put in someone's computer to secretly gather information about the user and relay it to advertisers or other interested parties. Spyware can get in a computer as a software virus or as the result of installing a new program. Data collecting programs that are installed with the user's knowledge are not, properly speaking, spyware, if the user fully understands what data is being collected and with whom it is being shared.
How can we stop adware and spyware?
What browser privacy settings help?
How do you set them?
What do we need on a website when sending data?
more information
Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information (such as items in a shopping cart) or to record the user's browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, logging in, or recording which pages were visited by the user as far back as months or years ago).