What Are Cookies?
A cookie is a small text file that a website or app sends to a user’s device. This text file collects information about user actions on your site.
Cookies store helpful information to enhance users’ experiences with your site, and possibly to improve your ability to reconnect with them later.
Information collected by cookies can include the user’s preferred language, device settings, browsing activities and other useful information.
Types of Cookies
Cookies can be classified in several different ways.
Session cookies are temporary cookies stored in the browser’s memory just until the browser is closed.
These types of cookies pose less of a security risk and are used to power e-commerce shopping carts, to control the page elements shown to a user during a single multi-page visit to a website, and for other short-term storage purposes.
Peristent cookies are longer-term cookies that are tagged by the issuer with an expiration date.
These cookies are stored by the browser even after the browser is closed. They are returned to the issuer every time you visit the site that issued the cookie or view a site that contains a resource (such as an ad) issued by the original cookie issuer.
In this way, persistent cookies can track your activity not only on the site that issued the cookie but also on any site that includes a resource issued by the same site. This is the mechanism sites like Google and Facebook use to create a log of user activity across multiple websites.
When you click “Remember Me” or a similar option when logging into an online account, a persistent cookie is used to store your login information on your browser.
Due to the fact that persistent cookies stick around much longer than session cookies, and can theoretically track your activity over time at multiple sites, persistent cookies pose a greater risk than session cookies.
First-party cookies are cookies created by the site you’re currently visiting. For example, while on this site we use cookies for various purposes, such as making our host filtering feature work. The cookies we issue while you’re visiting our site are first-party cookies.
Third-party cookies are cookies added by a domain that is not the domain you are currently visiting. The most common use of third-party cookies is to track users who click on advertisements and associate them with the referring domain.
For example, when you click on an ad on a website, a third-party cookie is used to associate your traffic with the site where the ad appeared.
While cookies are a necessary part of the modern web, they can also pose a considerable risk of invasion of privacy as well as a security risk to the websites that use them.
How to disable cookies through browser
If you want to explore the ways in which your browser stores cookies in your navigation , please follow these links on the websites of the respective suppliers.
Chrome: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95647?hl=it
Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/it/kb/Gestione%20dei%20cookie
Internet Explorer: http://windows.microsoft.com/it-it/windows7/how-to-manage-cookies-in-internet-explorer-9
Opera: http://help.opera.com/Windows/10.00/it/cookies.html
Safari: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1677?viewlocale=it_IT