Cookies

Full Title and Meme

Cookies are chunks of data that are placed in a user agent (typically a browser) that allow a web site to maintain continuing of user experience.

The problem with cookies is the power that it gives the web site, or a widget hosted on the web site to track the user.

Context

History

Starting from the entry on HTTP Cookie in Wikipedia we find that Lou Montulli of Netscape ported cookies from Unix to the Mosaic browser to enable an e-commerce application that was requested by Vint Cert, inter alia in 1994. The point was to save state on the client computer rather in the browser. While this was not the only solution to create session state between the user (as a client) and the web site (as a server), it proved to be the most flexible.