by Elton Gahr

Created on: October 25, 2010

The idea of cookies on your computer is a bit advanced for many people and even a bit scary for them once they understand the concept and so the idea of a zombie cookie is something that is even a bit more disturbing, but in order to understand either you have to understand first what a cookie is.

Website cookies are very important to the modern internet. The idea is simple and in general so is the implementation. When you go to a website they get information about you. In general this is information you give to them voluntarily. If you have sites that remember the log in and password for you when you visit them this is most likely done by a cookie that the site puts on your computer and then checks when you return. The problem as you can imagine is that this is a potential privacy concern. Not everyone wants some random website to keep records of them, but it is a minor concern because as files stored on your computer you can erase those cookies and while they are likely to put a new cookie on next time you visit their website the information is gone.

This is where zombie cookies come into play. As you might be able to determine from the name zombie cookies are cookies which come back from the dead. There were a large number of major websites which were sued because of this. They used adobe flash to save cookies so that if you deleted them off your own computer they would be put back on. This is not only against the law but very disturbing. In some ways the same as spyware as it collected your personal information to use to help these companies make money based on your information but attempting to eliminate your personal choice as to whether you wanted to participate in this or not.

If this is something that truly bothers you there are a couple of ways to deal with this. The most simple though is to use firefox and a simple to install add on called better privacy. This will allow you to prevent flash from downloading cookies or simply allow you to delete them when you want because while there are privacy concerns actually using cookies does help make the browsing experience a quite a lot faster and easier and for most people the information they gather is unimportant.

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