What Are Cookies On A Computer

If you have been playing around a lot with your computer, then you may have asked yourself what are cookies on a computer. This question comes up quite often with amateur computer programmers and everyday computer users alike. Cookies can be dangerous or convenient depending on what site has installed them on your computer and what that site’s intent is.

Cookies are small bits of information that a website stores about a visitor when visiting that site. The information stored in these cookies is usually login information such as usernames and passwords. This is where the convenience factor comes into play with cookies. With them you don’t have to enter your username and password every time you log into a website such as Facebook or Myspace. The username and password are basically assigned by the central database of the website to your computer through use of the cookies, and can only be viewed by these two sources, unless a third party hacks into either source.

There is a dark side of cookies! As previously mentioned, one of the most dangerous things about cookies is that a site that stores important information can be hacked, and the saved information stolen. This will most likely be used to login into your accounts and possibly steal your money or other information that will be used for financial gain for the hackers. The other bad side is that if the site is shady in the first place, then they may have used the information that you allowed to be put into a cookie to steal your bank account or similar type of information for their gain.

Should you allow your browser to use cookies or not? This is a very pressing question but for the most part, if you only give your information to trusted websites, then you should be safe as far as getting hacked or not!