Valid definition of a cookie: A cookie is a piece of text that a Web server can store on a user's hard disk. Cookies allow a Web site to store information on a user's machine and later retrieve it. The pieces of information are stored as name-value pairs.
Cookies are programs that Web sites put on your hard disk. They sit on your computer gathering information about you and everything you do on the Internet, and whenever the Web site wants to it can download all of the information the cookie has collected. [wrong]
Most Internet cookies are incredibly simple, but they are one of those things that have taken on a life of their own. Cookies started receiving tremendous media attention back in 2000 because of Internet privacy concerns, and the debate still rages.
On the other hand, cookies provide capabilities that make the Web much easier to navigate. The designers of almost every major site use them because they provide a better user experience and make it much easier to gather accurate information about the site's visitors.
The problem is, none of that information is correct. Cookies are not programs, and they cannot run like programs do. Therefore, they cannot gather any information on their own. Nor can they collect any personal information about you from your machine.
For example, a Web site might generate a unique ID number for each visitor and store the ID number on each user's machine using a cookie file.If you use Microsoft's Internet Explorer to browse the Web, you can see all of the cookies that are stored on your machine. The most common place for them to reside is in a directory calledc:\windows\cookies. When I look in that directory on my machine, I find 165 files. Each file is a text filethat contains name-value pairs, and there is one file for each Web site that has placed cookies on my machine.
For example, I have visited goto.com, and the site has placed a cookie on my machine. The cookie file for goto.com contains the following information:
UserID ---------> A9A3BECE0563982D ----------> www.goto.com/
Goto.com has stored on my machine a single name-value pair. The name of the pair is UserID, and the value is A9A3BECE0563982D. The first time I visited goto.com, the site assigned me a unique ID value and stored it on my machine.
The vast majority of sites store just one piece of information -- a user ID -- on your machine. But a site can store many name-value pairs if it wants to.
A name-value pair is simply a named piece of data. It is not a program, and it cannot "do" anything. A Web site can retrieve only the information that it has placed on your machine. It cannot retrieve information from other cookie files, nor any other information from your machine.
Source: Google
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