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When using your web browser, the sites you're visiting - especially those requiring a login or those which need to remember user settings of any kind - are often likely to send you a text file, called a 'cookie', which has the function of remembering the user settings so that, at the next visit, the user won't have to set them again. Thanks to this mechanism, there will also be no need for the server hosting the site to maintain a database with the user settings for each and every single user of the website.

While cookies may seem to only bring advantages to the user experience, unfortunately they have been long known by IT experts to be quite vulnerable security-wise. Cookies can in fact store a vast amount of personal data which, if out of control, may result in identity theft and other serious damage. Moreover, cookies can also be edited by a malicious user in order to exploit insecure sites.

It is therefore essential to know where such files are stored on your PC, which will enable you to check for correctness and possibly delete them to avoid privacy issues, e.g. when you're using a public computer such as those in Internet Cafes.

The exact location of cookies on your computer depends on name and version of your web browser; some advanced browsers such as IE and Mozilla Firefox will allow you to display - and even manage and delete in the case of Firefox - all the cookies gathered by the application while surfing the Net.

To manage cookies with Mozilla Firefox, open the browser, then click on Edit -> Preferences, click on the Privacy tag at the top right, and then look at the middle of the page. You will be presented with an interface that lets you choose whether the browser should store them until they expire (best choice if you are the only user of the PC) or every time you close the application (which should be the best setting if the computer can be accessed by people you don't personally know, or even by anyone other than yourself).

If you're an Internet Explorer 5 user, select Tools -> Internet Options, click on the 'Security' tab, then the 'Custom Level' button, scroll down the list until you find the 'Cookies' section.

For Internet Explorer 7, select Tools -> Internet Options, click on the Privacy tab and click on the 'Advanced' button. Click on the "Override automatic cookie handling" box to access the controls.

If you're using Opera browser, you should know that it is not possible to edit the raw file on the hard disk (cookies4.dat) by hand in order to remove unwanted cookies from your hard drive, but you can use Opera's server manager (go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Cookies, click "Manage cookies").

For all other browsers, the information on how to find your cookies can be easily found by googling for anything along the lines of '[program name] cookies'.

Learn more about this author, Dario Borghino.
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