I wrote a company-wide email today after three different people stopped by my office today in the span of one hour to express worries about website cookies! To prevent an outbreak of this, I sent out a company-wide email explaining my position on the matter. In case you are also concerned about cookies, here it is:

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To All:

I would like to address your concerns about website cookies. First, know that they are simply small text files that are stored on your computer. Here is what a typical cookie looks like:

en_GB
www.google.com/
1425
2053574882
29726548
4298754968
23581292
*

Personally, I don’t think cookies are harmful. They are website-specific and only contain information that you freely give them. A particular website cannot access any other website’s cookies. So why would you want them? Cookies are useful. For instance, our website creates a cookie when someone uploads a file. That cookie contains all the text values that the user entered (except the filenames). That way, the next time that person goes to upload another file, they won’t have to fill out all the fields again. Another example is a corporate website that has a different version of their website for different geographic regions (i.e. HP North America, HP Asia, etc.). The first time you go to the site, you have to choose your region. The website then stores that value in a cookie so the next time you go to the site, it automatically chooses the correct region.

Some people don’t like cookies because they can allow syndicates of websites that all tie in to a common website to track which website you visited. I don’t think that’s a big deal. If company X and company Y are in cahoots to find out if I visited one of their websites then let them, maybe they’ll start showing me more relevant ads. While I don’t see that as a privacy risk, some people do. I think it’s a small price to pay for the benefits cookies have to offer.

That’s just my opinion. You should decide for yourself. For more information, read: http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/security/are-cookies-dangerous/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie.

If you want to delete your cookies, please read http://help.expedient.com/browsers/cookies.shtml.

(name deleted)
IT Manager

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