If you have a corporate website, you may have already been inform about the importance of having a cookie notice on the site. This is a legal requirement that we must all comply with but that many ignore, and are not even clear about what cookies are. To clarify things, in this post we offer you all the keys about cookies, including their definition and how they work.
A cookie is a piece of text that a web server can store on a user’s hard drive. Cookies allow a website to store information on a user’s machine and then retrieve it. Pieces of information are stor as name-value pairs.
If you use Chrome, you can see the that are stor on your computer by visiting this page: you’ll see, a single site can store many name-value pairs if it wants.
The most appropriate definition of cookie is the following
Cookies are not programs, just data with a name, so they cannot do anything “bad” to the device. Furthermore, a website can only access cookies left by itself, not those from other websites.
How Internet Cookies Work
When you visit a website for the phone number list first time, it stores a cookie on your hard drive. When you visit that website again, the browser will search your hard drive for the cookies of that site and send all the name-value pairs to the server. In this way it recovers the information from the cookie.
If the website does not receive any name-value pair, it will know that it is the first time you visit it and will create a cookie.
What can you do with cookies
Cookies are design to offer a more personaliz experience to Internet users. Large e-commerce stores use cookies to save users’ preferences and show them products relat to their tastes when they return. For example, if you go to Amazon to search for laptops on your next visit, several outstanding laptop deals may appear. The problem is that the same computer can be used by several people, but that is fixed by making each person have their own account on Amazon, thus separating their preferences into separate cookies.
Many websites use cookies where site information is stored so that the page loads much faster for returning users. Social networks use cookies to show users content that may interest them… And so on.
For the owner of a website, the regulations are simple. You only need a cookie notice and a legal text for those who want to know more. For the Book Your List notice you only have to integrate a small code into the website or install a plugin if you use WordPress and as for the legal text, there are several models on the Internet that you can adapt.
