The Cookie Monster

You visited SLATE yesterday. You visited today. Each time you were shown our attractive and informative cover. An hour later you return and see no cover, but see the contents page instead. How do we know that you already saw it? The answer is cookies. Whenever you ask an Internet site for a page, it can send back a little "cookie" of information. In our case, that information is the date of your last visit. The cookie is stored by your browser, but the next time you visit that site, the cookie is returned. By using cookies, sites can maintain some continuity between your visits. But unless the site has specifically asked for personal data, it doesn't really know who you are--just that you were there before.

Since the site never gets any information from your machine that it didn't put there, it's hard to say that cookies do any harm. But some people contend that the data about a visit (what you visited and how often, for instance) is itself personal data. They want the Internet to remain completely anonymous. Of course, this conflicts with an increasing trend toward personalization of data.

The current solution to this conflict is that many browsers allow you to decline cookies. On Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0, go to the "View" menu and choose "Options." Click on the "Advanced" tab. Clicking on the "Warn before accepting cookies" check box will give you a warning whenever a site attempts to give you a cookie. To do the same thing in Netscape Navigator 3.0, go to the "Options" menu and choose "Network Preferences." Click on the "Protocols" tab, then check the "Show an alert before accepting a cookie" check box. Try it out--it's mildly interesting, but gets boring quickly.