Cookies

Typically we think that cookies are a good thing, but when it comes to technology they are not so nice. They can ruin the use of the internet in my opinion. They are annoying, and when you really understand what they are, I can become something frightening. What is a cookie? A cookie is a file hidden on your computer, so your browser and other companies can track your online sessions, looking at what you look at and saving bits of information that are useful. Are you a little less excited now? You should be. If someone hacks your computer, they can use those cookies for less than virtuous things, putting it mildly. Bluntly, if they hack your computer or any device for that matter, and they know how to use those cookies, you are in a world of pain.

Now let me explain why I brought this up. I had this habit, that every week, I would go into my computer and wipe it clean of cookies and other files that attached itself to my computer. However, I have been very poor at keeping up with this weekly habit, so for the last few months I have not done that. Ever since I switched operating systems from Windows 8 to Windows 10, I have not done that. I have found that it is much more difficult to find the function I had to wipe my computer of cookies. It requires you to go into settings, then your control panel (which I still have no figured out how to get to directly without opening up a different setting menu), then clicking on to internet options, and finally hitting the delete button. This option of deleting all of this stuff is now hidden and much more difficult to access than it was before. I have speculation, but I'll leave that for latter. Then when I finally hit delete, it took a very long time for this process to finish, about three minutes, where when I was doing this weekly it took thirty seconds at most. That is six times longer, feel free to double check my math on that. Now that might not seem like a long time, but take this into consideration, it does not take a computer long to count to a million. Those three minutes were full of bits of information and other files that we may not even see in a life time because there is many in those three minutes. What I am getting at here is that three minutes to us is not long, but conceptually for a computer the amount of things it can do in three minutes is far greater than what we can do. I am saying that I had a lot of cookies and other hidden files on my computer that my computer got rid of in the time of three minutes.

My speculation as to why it is harder to delete cookies off of your computer now is because companies are trying to have people keep these cookies on our computer, so they can track us longer and better, building that online profile that I mentioned in a few posts back. They are trying to track us and profile us, so they can gear the ads they throw at us to better fit us. They cannot do that if you have a person like me, deleting the cookies off of his computer every single week. Their profile is a lot less accurate, a lot less specific, than if they had those cookies on the computer for six months, a year. Now the fact that people can hack your device and use this, at its basic form, tracking file against you should be frightening, but the fact it most of us do not care that we will not delete them off of our computer. However, just like everyone else we will only care when something bad happens to us. When we get attacked and have our own information used against us because the hackers have a very complete and accurate online profile of us. Or am I being overly paranoid?

This is an article about cookies and how to get rid of them.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/242939/how_to_delete_cookies.html

Comments

  1. UnknownMay 17, 2017 at 6:24 PM

    i think that companies using these cookies for looking at our information is very interesting. i think that it shows just how desperate and greedy they are to learn about their customers and try to sell more to them. its also very interesting how program updates have made it much more difficult to remove this. i agree with your point on why companies make it harder to remove cookies. i think that it is a very reasonable assumption that companies do this to make us less motivated or not able to remove these cookies. your last point about hackers using this info is very interesting, and i would be curious to learn more about it.

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