On 20 Aug 2000, 9:54, John P. Penasack wrote:
> Is there a way of notifying potential Cookie installers that they must
> explain what they are installing?
Yes. You send them e-mail and make your inquiry. Put them on the
spot. :-)
Some sites have this explained on their Privacy page - the page where
they give you their BS explanation of what their Privacy Policy is and
sometimes why they are placing so many cookies on your hard drive.
> That sounds naive, but I feel there is an obligation on the installers
> part to explain why so many from a site are necessary.
Answer: To better control you.
Web sites want to keep data on their visitors, but they don't want to
keep that data on their servers due to the high demand of their own
resources for the many visitors they get, so they keep it on our
individual disk drives, instead.
> I'm aware of the cookie list in the Browser->Internet
> Options->General->Settings,
> but can't figure out why I have 8 folders in Windows\Temporary Internet
> Files\Content IE5. They have random alpha-numeric names, and all seem to
> have the same list of cookies. Can they all be deleted, because the
> list is at the Content IE5 level?
IE's method of cookie and cache archiving is based on their belief that
outside interests would have a harder time stealing the data if it is
located in an arbitrary or random assigned directory. Personally, I
think it is all designed to make it more difficult for the end user to
maintain. I used to like the way I could make the Netscape cookie.txt
file read_only. Web sites would think they were writing to the file,
but actually nothing would get entered to it. :-)
John, visit Cookie Central to learn all you can about Internet Cookies:
http://www.cookiecentral.com/
In the final analysis, you can't surf the web and participate in many
of the services the web offers without enabling cookies. It is a
necessary evil for many things, such as services that use your login
data to take you to your special web page or shopping services that
keep track of your "shopping cart."
Alan
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
