What Are Cookies? Cookies Types

Author • Praise Oyeniyi

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What Are Cookies⁉️

No no, I won't be talking about the brown crispy biscuit today, we would be talking about HTTP Cookies. I'm sure most people are familiar with them, those types you see when you visit a website that asks you to 'enable cookies because their sites function better with them'.

Cookies are small text files that your web browser stores on your device (either in your browser’s folder itself or under the program data). In general, cookies are used by websites to store user data locally and on the server side in order to prepare customized Web pages based on the user preferences or to save a site login information for you.

A cookie typically contains two bits of data: a unique ID for each user, and the website’s name.

How Do Cookies work⁉️

Joe wants to get a wristwatch from an online store, so he visits their websites which uses cookies, Joe was asked to fill out a form providing his personal information; like name, email address, username, etc. to sign up into his personal account. Joe’s information is then stored as a cookie and sent to the Web browser, which stores the information for later use. The next time Joe goes to the same Web site, the browser sends the cookie to the Web server making it easier for the website to be displayed in Joe preference.

By default, web servers are so dumb as they have no memory to store Joe’s information, so the websites Joe visits package Joe’s information and stores it on the web browser which allows the site to remember Joe and his preferences.

So, for example, instead of seeing just a generic welcome page you might see a welcome page with Joe’s name in it.

Types of cookies⁉️

-Session cookie

Also known as temporary cookie. The session cookie only stores user information for as long as the user is still on the website. Session cookies lost all its data immediately the web browser is closed.

-Permanent cookie

Also known as persistent cookie. The permanent cookie is stored on your hard drive until it expires (they set with expiration dates) or until you delete the cookie. Persistent cookies are used to collect Identifying information about the user, such as Web surfing behavior or user preferences for a specific Web site.

-Third-party cookies

Third-party cookies are generated by third-parties (mainly advertisers) with the aim of collecting certain information from web users to carry out researches, to ensure that products and services are marketed towards targeted audience.

What Are Cookies? Cookies Types

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