When you hear the word, “cookies,” you think of warm cookies baking in your oven, but Internet cookies are completely different. Newspapers and magazines often define cookies as “programs that websites place on your hard disk.” As it turns out, the newspaper definition of Internet cookies is wrong. Computer experts claim that cookies aren’t programs. The newspapers also say that cookies “gather information about everything you do on the Internet.” This statement is also incorrect because cookies are incapable of gathering information about computer users or computers themselves. A more correct definition of an Internet cookie is a piece of text that a web server stores on your computer’s hard drive. In other words, they allow websites to store information on your computer in order to retrieve that information later on.

Let’s say, for example, that you use Internet Explorer to browser the web. You can actually view all the Internet cookies that are stored on your computer’s hard drive from your c:windowscookies directory. The directory contains text files with name-value pairs. The directory also contains a single file for each web site that you have visited. For example, web sites generate a unique ID for each visitor, and then stores that number on your computer in a text file.

The c:windowscookies directory contains simple text files. You can open the text file and view which Web site placed the file on your computer. The file name also displays the web site’s name. For example, if you visited goto.com, the web site will place a cookie on your computer, and the cookie file for the web site may look something like this:

UserID A9B3CD057892D www.goto.com

In the above example, the name of the pair is UserID, and the value is A9B3CD057892D. The first time you visit goto.com, the website will assign you a unique ID and store it on your computer.

You can also open the file by double-clicking it.