Cookies Cause Privacy Issues
Cookies are little deposits of data a website puts on your computer every time you visit their site. These log where you went on the site, where you spent the most, what you looked at, and other things to pertaining to your site activity. They also save user preferences on log-in and password based sites, and even data from your word documents and other offline transactions.
Why do they do all of this? Well, for one they do save your user preferences, so maybe you can stay logged in until you sign out of some particular sites, and they can help bring you towards parts of the site you enjoyed. This is generally helpful, but these cookies can also be dangerous too.
Recently, a controversy has been brewing over the use of cookies. Some people go shopping on the Internet, looking for better deals by cutting out the middle man or what have you, and they do so looking for good deals. Recently, some sites have been using cookies and identifying which users have money and which ones don’t, and marketing their information and wares that way. This way, if a wealthy man had cookies on his computer of him buying off of an expensive car site, the merchandise he saw on the front page of a buying website would be different (and probably more expensive) than what others see.
There are a couple of ways to counter this. This can be done by every basic browser. In your security/privacy options tab probably at the top of your browser, you can choose to delete cookies. This will help for any cookies you previously got on your computer, but you will have to do this at the end of every web session. There is a better way though.
Stop cookies and keep yourself safe and anonymous browsing online. First, you can actually choose to stop allowing cookies onto the computer and this will completely stop their flow. This way you don’t have to keep deleting them, and fretting over the ones that weren’t deleted.
Then, on top of that, an anonymous proxy will actually cloak your location by changing your IP address, and block hackers by providing you with a secure tunnel of encrypted access.
