Content area
Full Text
Weihong Peng: Weihong Peng is a PhD student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA.
Jennifer Cisna: Jennifer Cisna is the Community Services Librarian for the Bensenville Community Public Library, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: We wish to thank Professor Martha Williams for her great efforts in advising us and editing this article. Received March 2000 Accepted April 2000
Introduction
The emerging technology of cookies has penetrated into a huge number of Web sites at an astonishing speed. Cookies contribute a great deal to a user-friendly network paradigm: designed to maintain state in a stateless environment (HTML), cookies can allow a Website to track a user as the Web site is viewed. On the other hand, the placement of cookies on a client-side computer is a cause for concern. We discuss both sides of the technology in this paper.
What are cookies?
Definition
Peters and Sikorski (1997) offer a clear definition of a cookie: "Cookies are small data structures sent from a Web server to your browser and saved on your hard drive in a text file. They are nothing more than a string of characters (letters and numbers) that store certain pieces of information about you." Cookies are placed on the hard drive of a Website user without the user's consent to the placement. In fact, many users are unaware that cookies have been stored on their hard drives by the Web server.
The information that the cookie stores is usually related to browser usage such as passwords or information filled out in a form. When a user accesses a Web site with a cookie function for the first time, a cookie is sent from server to the browser and stored with the browser in the local computer. With additional information about the state of the user side, the cookie is sent back to the server. Later, when the user accesses the Web pages of the same server with the same browser from the same computer (all three conditions are necessary), he will always be recognised because of the matching cookie. To make it easier to understand, a cookie is much like a laundry "claim-check" - you drop something off and get a ticket, then when...