Cookies!! What are they? (HTTP Cookies)
Where did it come from?
The HTTP Cookie was invented by Lou Montulli in 1994 to resolve an issue for his company Netscape Communications. Netscape Communications had trouble dealing with the vast amount of data coming in from their customers. Their servers were getting too full from storing a user’s shopping cart data. Montulli was inspired by the term “magic cookie”, used by Unix programmers, which is a packet of data that the program receives and sends back unchanged.
What is it?
A (HTTP) Cookie is a small piece of data from a specific website that has many functionalities. A Cookie can:
- track users browsing activity
- remember login details for a specific website
- track a website’s visitor counts
- along with many more features!
Cookies are stored as plain text in a user’s browser and store information in key value pairs. Each cookie has a unique id. When you visit a website, the website puts a cookie on your hard drive. The site then uses that ID to keep track of the session (overall visits to that website from start to finish). Cookies are used to keep track of the type of items you’ve looked at , added to your cart, or even save coupon’s from a specific website. Cookies have an added function of tracking activity. Which is the reason why if you shop on Amazon and you end up going back to Facebook, you may see ads for items that you have been searching for on Amazon. If a company uses a cookie, they legally must give a notification. You can find out the different types of cookies that the website is using by following these steps:
- Inspect the current page you are on by right clicking on the page and choosing the “Inspect” option.
2. Go to the “Network” section of the developer tools and refresh the page.
You should see “www.google.com” pop up along with many different types of files. If you click onto “www.google.com” you can view the headers,
3. Check the Response Headers for your website. This will give you a lot of information, such as the cookies that your browser is using as well as the type of information your browser can accept.
Cookies remember the user via the set-cookiehelper which presets information for our browser. You can view all of your cookies through the “Application” Tab and under the “Storage” section.
TLDR
A Cookie is a small piece of data from a website that assigned a unique ID to the client (you). It’s mainly for remember information on the server side, such as the ability to login to a website and having your session persist without having to login again.
