To Ban Cookies
No, not the sugary sweet ones. These cookies are much less succulent, and can sometimes be dangerous, and not just for your diet plan. These online cookies are just little pieces of data that a website puts on your computer when you log on. Inside the cookies are strands of information that record various things that you did on the Internet, like what parts of the site you went on, how long you stayed there, and other things about your browsing habits. This information is supposed to be helpful and for the most part it is. It serves to tell the website that it is you signing on, and though this they can bring you back to the parts of the site you liked, or even automatically load all of your user preferences that you had stored. This allowed for a more stream-lined browsing of the site, and also it allows for a site to be loaded faster.
As was mentioned before though, cookies can also be dangerous. Instead of the helpful cookies mentioned above, you can possibly have malicious cookies. These are cookies installed on your computer either by a hacker or a bad website. Through this, they can hack into your folders and steal your passwords, or simply try and track you back to your real-life location. Even worse, these cookies could contain viruses that are planted directly on to your hard drive, and your virus scanner might not even recognize it. These can either be installed to try and steal identifying data about you, or simply with malicious intent to crash your system.
Either way, cookies are archaic technology these days. They are a relic of dial up times, and simply haven’t been removed. Websites often have log-in services that allow you to save your preferences and easily load them, and the speed advantage is a moot point due to today’s lightening fast Internet connections. The point is, cookies have been played out and might be considered a dangerous thing. EPIC, the big privacy organization, proposes that all cookies are banned due to their Internet privacy risks.
While this is a noble cause on their part, it is hard to move the status quo of legislation. They could fight for years and years before they actually got something changed, even though they are such a widespread program. In the meantime, try out an anonymous proxy to eat away (no pun intended) all of your cookie worries. Every anonymous proxy has a built in blocking system, not for websites, but for pieces of identifying information trying to access your computer. You can select to block cookies and be done with them, and be surfing anonymous while you are at it.
