Chris,
> The great majority of the time, cookies are used for two
> things. User prefs
> at a site that provides custom page display. (my.yahoo.com,
> excite.com,
> etc.) And online shopping sites that have a "shopping cart"
> type of setup.
> In the latter case, the cookie only contains information
> about the items you
> have purchased, and typically has a short expiration period.
>
> Chris
There appears to be another use for Cookies, which I haven't completely
figured out yet. Just for the fun of it, I recently set my browser to notify
me before setting any type of cookie, and found out that a lot of banners
and ads seem to want to set cookies. Just set your cookie prefs to 'always
ask' and go to http://v3.vapor.com, the ad at the top wil try to set a
cookie.
I haven't looked into it yet, but since banners and ads can come from other
sites, setting cookies from these sites would allow the source of the banner
or ad to see if you have visited other sites which show their banners. This
way, the banner and ad producers can try and find patterns in visitor
behaviour and will probably try to modify the ads and banners to try and
give you more specific ads they think you will like.
For the PC, there was a program called AtGuard (not available any more),
which filtered out banners and advertisements very effectively. It seemed to
be based on the principle that most commercial sites use names like
'advertisement' for their banner includes, so filtering out anything that
has 'adv' in it gets rid of 90% of the ads.
This kind of functionality would be really great, as it not only gets rid of
unwanted ads, it will render pages faster and require less bandwidth.
Wouter
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