Cookies and privacy
The meaning of cookies
These are small text strings used to perform automatic authentication, session tracking, and storage of specific information regarding users accessing the server, such as favorite websites or the contents of shopping carts in ecommerce sites.
The term“cookie,” literally “cookie,” comes from“magic cookie,” which in the Unix environment describes the procedure (the word also refers to the Chinese“fortune cookie” because it is a kind of package that contains other hidden information).
What are cookies used for?
Websites use cookies to personalize users’ exploration and collect information about site usage.
On many sites, cookies are also used to store information to ensure greater consistency between sections of the site, such as a shopping cart or customized pages.
When the Web site is trusted, cookies can actually help improve exploration by allowing the site to collect useful information about user preferences or by preventing the user from logging in each time the site is visited.
Some cookies, however, such as those saved by advertising banners, can pose a privacy risk because they track sites visited.
Is it appropriate to block cookies?
Not necessarily blocking all cookies can actually help protect privacy, but it may be appropriate to limit the features available on some websites. Indeed, it is better to choose the websites for which to allow cookies.
The types of cookies
Essential, strictly necessary cookies are important for the proper functioning of the sites; they allow people to navigate the websites and take advantage of their features. They are used to temporarily record data from electronic carts.
Performance cookies help to understand how users interact with websites by providing information about sections visited, time spent on the site, and any issues that have arisen, for example, an error message. Examples are Google Analytics cookies to investigate statistical data of web traffic and user behavior in accessing and exploring the website.
Functional browsing type cookies, functionally cookies, are those cookies that record the user’s choice to allow them, for example, to remember the login, to register products in the shopping cart and find them again the next session, to save the language selected by the user.
Profiling cookies, advertising cookies, are aimed at creating profiles related to the user and are used in order to send advertising messages in line with the preferences expressed by the user when browsing the web.
