Hi Krishnakumari! The reason AV software flags tracking cookies is because they are a* privacy threat* to individuals on whose machines they are set. It most often does not carry anything malicious and there is nothing that needs to be '* disinfected*' from it. It is just like any other cookie that stores information pertaining your interactions with some website.
Why then are tracking cookies flagged by AV or how do they differ from any other normal cookie? Tracking cookies are set surreptitiously into your browser by some website (lets call it R) that has advertised (or could also be broken into) in some other website (lets call this A) that you had visited. Now you visit website B, in which R advertises again, the cookie gets sent back to R. Extend this to a few hundred websites, you can see that the tracking cookies will allow R to build a profile of your browsing patterns without your knowledge which is exactly what some laws forbid. Usually, some service provider would love to have this sort of mechanism to provide *'better'*services to its existing customers or to entice new customers or simply advertise to people itself. BT Phorm (a behavioural advertisement system) was flayed by the security world for this same reason - it followed activities of its customers. As a user of the Internet, tracking cookies are better kept with the website itself and not my system. Delete them! No use quarantining or cleaning it! The best way to keep yourself clean from these menace - use Firefox 3.5 with private browsing for untrusted sites that keeps no cookies after the session. There might be other web browsers that provide private browsing feature but I do not work with anything else but FF to know. Call it a frog-in-the-well mentality! :) Cheers! Navneet
