- How do the websites I visit keep track of what I do?
- What is a cookie and what does it do?
- Are cookies good or bad?
Consider these questions as you review the examples below. Try the quiz from the left menu: What Have You Learned? after you’ve spent some time with this section.
Adjusting cookie settings is slightly different from one browser to another. This page on Enabling Cookies links to step-by-step instructions for Google Chrome, Firefox 2 or 3, Internet Explorer 6 or 7 and Safari 3.
Watch the videos below. Think about the questions above as you watch. Then review the Think Before You Ink section before checking your understanding (at the bottom of the page).
The following short video offers more information about cookies and how they are used.
Video posted by: googleprivacy
- Cookies are small pieces of code that are stored on your machine and provide a identifying code to the websites that you visit.
- Cookies are essential to keep track of individual actions on a website. They make it convenient to do what we need to do on the internet. For example, they allow Amazon to store info about your browsing history and previous purchases so that they can recommend books for you. Cookies associate data you have submitted to online forms with your unique id, so that you don’t have to re-enter that info every time you visit the site. They also make it possible for website analytics (like Google analytics) to track user visits accurately. We use cookies in this tutorial to keep track of your choices in the Check Yourself column.
- Cookies are necessary for site personalization (such as Google Chrome, MSNBC, BBC or Netvibes) and to participate in many online courses at UBC.
- Cookies also track your online behaviour: the websites you visit, things you buy, and messages you post. Many early security issues have been addressed, however you may be uncomfortable with the automatic nature of the connection between your computer and other sites.
- You can control your cookies. You can set your preferences to enable or disable cookies, or to notify you each time a cookie is requested.
- Play the video above to learn how you can modify the amount of access that cookies have on your computer.
What have you learned in this section? Take the quiz: 
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That article helps me a lot, thanks!
I don’t get it…
this is a very helpful side used to teach you that you can be shown across the web
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So the websites a person has visited can be found by looking at the cookies?
Not really. The sites you have visited can be found by looking at your browser history. The websites you have visited from your computer can be tracked through your browser history. Your browser history uses a kind of quick access memory called cache. Clearing your cache will erase your browser history. See Erase Your Digital Path for more information about that.
Cookies make it possible for the sites you visit to remember who you are and track your browsing activity while on their site. Hope that helps.
hey ive heard about cookies a few times and never really understood what they were. So i watched your vid to find out, it was very interessting and enlightening thanks UBC.
Hey Daniel,
Glad you’re learning about cookies – they can be really useful!