Cookies

Cookies are just any form of web code that tracks what visitors are doing.

Some cookies are essential for some web site features to work, such as cookies at Amazon.com that recognize who you are when you visit the site.

Other cookies are intended to track who views which ads on a web site, where they go on the site, how long they spend on the site, what site they came from, and other details that are used for advertisers' marketing.

And since the same kind of tracking can be used to do more nefarious things, some are what I'd call genuine spyware, intended to try to gather information about you that could be used harmfully, including stealing enough personal data to amount to identity theft.

So as you can see cookies can be anywhere from essential and beneficial to intrusive and even dangerous.

You can probably study the issue for months if you want to learn everything there is to learn about cookies. Personally, I don't worry about it too much as long as I don't visit shadier web sites where "true" spyware is likely to be lurking. Once in a while I go to Safari > Preferences > Security, click the Show Cookies button, and delete items for any web site which I don't regularly visit, and all cookies that are clearly just for advertisers' tracking purposes. I keep cookies for the sites that I use regularly, such as Apple's cookies, Amazon's cookies, etc.

Message was edited by: Rachel R

Rocket-Fox wrote:
Can you give me any tips on how to know if there just advertising cookie vs say (true) spyware.

I really don't know, but since the advertising stuff isn't essential, just delete anything that you don't like the looks of. 😉

Honestly, the chances of running across really nefarious spyware are very slim, unless you're visiting some shady web sites. Avoiding such sites is probably one of the best forms of defense.

Also once you delete any cookies your unsure of are you safe from ther possible bad tracking ways

Once you have deleted a cookie it can't do its work any more. Of course, if you go back to the site where you got the cookie, you can pick it up again.

Safari has some simple cookie controls in its Security preferences. Turning on the setting to accept cookies "only from sites you navigate to" will reduce the cookie clutter quite a bit, since the types of cookies that are from external web sites (mostly advertising tracking cookies) are rejected.

Message was edited by: Rachel R

Rocket-Fox wrote:
Other than shady web sites 101 IE **** got any other ones you can think of to lessen my chance even more?

Not really. Just using common sense should be good.

There are programs that will hunt down spyware on Macs. I've never bothered with it, but you might want to try something like that out if it makes you more comfortable. 🙂 Just remember that programs like that tend to call all cookies "spyware," which I think is a little misleading ...

You're very welcome. 🙂