Cookies. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.

Nearly half of the respondents to this week's SNET Internet survey have no idea what Internet cookies are, so I'll ask the other half to forgive me for defining my terms before we go any further. From whatis.com:

"A cookie is information that a Web site puts on your hard disk so that it can remember something about you at a later time. (More technically, it is information for future use that is stored by the server on the client side of a client/server communication.) Typically, a cookie records your preferences when using a particular site. Using the Web's Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), each request for a Web page is independent of all other requests. For this reason, the Web page server has no memory of what pages it has sent to a user previously or anything about your previous visits. A cookie is a mechanism that allows the server to store its own information about a user on the user's own computer. You can view the cookies that have been stored on your hard disk (although the content stored in each cookie may not make much sense to you). The location of the cookies depends on the browser. Internet Explorer stores each cookie as a separate file under a Windows subdirectory. Netscape stores all cookies in a single cookies.txt fle."

For those of you who are still reading: Yes, that's a mouthful. What it means is that cookies are the means by which web sites keep track of you and the means by which they "remember" who you are. This can be a great convenience -- cookies can remember your preferences for a given site. Cookies are how certain sites know, without being told more than once, what your zip code is so that they can give you the right weather report or the news headlines and links you would like to see.

In the best of all possible worlds, cookies would only perform helpful tasks that are chosen by the user. In the world we actually live in -- well, only 4 percent of the respondents to our survey indicated that cookies are unequivocally good things. About a third of respondents mistrust cookies and another 13 percent expressed ambivalence -- "Some are good, some are bad."

In other words, most people who know what Internet cookies are don't like them much.

Why?

Besides being helpful, cookies are also web marketers' best friends. Cookies can track the browsing habits of millions of web surfers in aggregate; cookies can track individual users' movements through a web site and even from site to site. They may not know your name (unless you give it to them) but web marketers can build a pretty accurate profile of what you do and what you like.

This worries some people a lot, especially people who like their privacy and who don't trust marketing departments not to snoop and be annoying, which means practically everyone.

By saying this, it's not my purpose or intention to get everyone riled or worried about cookies or their roles in our online lives. As I type, I note that I have 219 cookies on this computer. Anyone who checked my computer and knew where to look would have a pretty good idea of where I've been on the web ... at least recently. (I destroy my cookies every few weeks.)

Should you care passionately about cookies? That's not for me to say -- personally, I view them with only a minor degree of suspicion. But you should know what they are, and that's why I wrote this column.

Some good links to sites and pages that explain about cookies in more detail than almost anyone would want:

CookieCentral.com: Privacy news and general information. In particular, see "The Cookie Controversy".

The EPIC Cookies Page.: Electronic Privacy Information Center site.

Privacy.net: How to Bake Your Own (Internet) Cookie.