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| Home » Archives » Is the Internet a Cookie Monster? | Friday, July 30, 2010 |
 
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Is the Internet a Cookie Monster?
by Al Doran Several times each month I have the opportunity to meet with large and small groups of human resource professionals and discuss with them the benefits of the Internet to our profession. At the beginning of each meeting I try and get a reading on the number of people in the room who have an internet account at home or work. A year and a half ago, I was lucky to get a 25% positive reply to that question, but today I am finding that the audience is made up of about 70% or higher of those with internet access at home and/or at work. With that increased participation in the internet, comes a more aware audience, in the benefits of the internet and in the tools with which to use the net. What is surprising however, is to find roughly 5% or less of any audience who are aware of "Cookies" on the Internet. What is a "Cookie" anyway? IBM says it best in their special feature to the Toronto Star on November 15, 1997 when they said: "The best way to understand cookies is to recall the story of Hansel and Gretel, the two children who left behind a trail of crumbs so they would be able to find their way back through the woods. Computer cookies work in kind of the same way. Many Web sites leave a little "crumb" of information on your computer's hard drive when you visit them. These cookies (also called "magic cookies") are then used to customize the site you for you whenever you go back for another visit. For example, a cookie may contain your password for a site, so that you don't need to re-enter it each time you re-visit. It may also tell the Web site whether you like pages to display in frames or just as text, the type of information you're interested in viewing, and even the sorts of items you're interested in buying on shopping sites." IBM go on to say that "In general, cookies are relatively harmless". But they do acknowledge that they can be used to track where you visited on the site you visited, which is useful information to anyone hosting a web page. This tells the host site what is popular and what is not. But think about that, do you really want anyone knowing what web pages you have visited? Articles on cookies (by IBM and others who have web pages with cookies) would have us believe that these crumbs are dropped into our hard drives to make our visits to their sites more efficient, and that each cookie can only be read by the host site that deposited it in the first place. Another popular stance (by those with cookies) is that cookies can't access information on your hard-drive, such as your e-mail address, passwords, what kind of PC you are using, memory capacity, your library of software (registered or not), and other personal information. Well, that stance may well be true, today at least, for many of the companies who are dropping cookies into your hard drive, let's hope they are. But what of tomorrow? What if there are companies already dropping those cookies into our PC's (generally without our knowledge or permission) gain an edge and so everyone else starts doing it just to keep up? What if its just to track the sites you visit today, but tomorrow they will be able to tell how many and what size Lotus files you have on your PC, the amount of space you need to store Word .doc documents, the registration numbers of each of the software applications you have on your work station, the number of e-mails you send or receive a day, the list goes on. The plain and simple truth of it is that whatever is being done is without the knowledge or consent of the great majority of web users. Most of us are using either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Explorer as the browsers that we surf the web with, and both of these well known products come with a default setting to accept cookies. If you have been using either of these products for the past year or so you probably have a ton of cookies on your hard drive right now. Until the industry comes to some kind of understanding on what is ethical to be distributed in this manner, and each of us is comfortable with that code of conduct, it may serve us well to challenge those sites who are dumping cookies onto our hard drives and to take action to control this practice. If your new on the web and have just downloaded either Netscape or Explorer, the settings are already set to accept cookies. But you can go in right now and turn that setting to the OFF position. That's the good news. The bad news is that if you are using an older version of Netscape (older than Version 4) then each time a cookie tries to get onto your hard drive, you will be prompted, as many as 20 times (but the norm is just 2). The only way to prevent these annoying prompts is to download the new Netscape version 4. Once you change the settings you will not be bothered again. Here is how to change the settings on Netscape Navigator 3.0: Go to the "Options" Menu. Select "Network Preferences". Select "Protocols". Click to "Show an Alert" before "Accepting a Cookie". Click "OK" to accept the setting. Here is how to change the settings on Netscape Navigator 4.0: Go to "Edit" Menu Select "Preferences" Select "Advanced" Click "Disable Cookies" Click "Warn me before accepting a cookie" Click "OK" to accept the setting. Here is how to remove a cookie if you have already been accepting them: Open the file "Cookies.txt" from the Netscape Directory using notepad (or Word but be SURE to save as text) and delete everything below the line which reads: "# This is a generated file! Do not edit." Then save. Here is how to change the settings on Microsoft Explorer: Go to "View" menu. Select "Options" Select "Advanced" Click on "Warn before accepting cookies". Click OK to save this setting. Hopefully all the generous companies that host web sites and create cookies for us are doing so in our mutual best interests, however if you are not quite ready to take that risk, change your browser settings to block the automatic addition of these uninvited crumbs to your hard drive. Good luck with the "Cookie Monster". -Al Doran is President of Phenix Management Int'l, a Toronto, Ont. management consulting firm specializing in HRMS issues. He is co-author of a new book published by Nelson Canada, "Human Resource Management Systems", ISBN 0-17-604825-1. He may be reached at: and his home page is http://www.pmihrm.com/ November, 1997 COPYRIGHT, Al Doran, November, 1997 Phenix Management Int'l
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