I was looking around on my computer today and i notice that i have tons of these things called cookies. A friend of mine was talking to me a while ago and i think he told me they keep track of what a i look at on my computer. Is it okay to delete the whole lot of them? Can anyone help me out any information would help.
Andrew Cassidy
Here you go.
Howdy,
Cookies are just small text files that a web site you visit creates on your computer. It really depends on how the website uses the cookies on whether they are a pain or not. For instance, the Chiff forum uses cookies to remember who you are and your preferences. Pretty harmless. But other websites are not so benign.
If you just wholesale delete all cookies, the good ones will get deleted too and you’ll have to log back into Chiff (for example).
Personally, I like to delete all cookies to start with a clean slate. Then I set my browser’s preferences to prompt me whenever a website wants to set a cookie. That way I can choose the cookies I want to accept. It’s pain, but it protects your privacy (you won’t believe how many cookies certain websites want to set on your computer).
Cookies are a seperate issue from spyware, which is a MUCH bigger problem.
Best,
Dave
Rats! I was hoping you meant the other cookies. 
Symantec’s Firewall software includes iClean (okay, I’m using a Mac). This little beauty scrubs your harddrive of cookies, history files and a few other types of files that your browser-or other servers–place on your computer.
It’s unnerving when you’re booting up and the activity indicator on your modem goes into hyperdrive. I run iClean after every online sessino. Haven;t seen that light at startup since. 
Dumbest thing I’ve seen lately is a retail website (BestBuy if I remember right) that won’t let you access their website at all unless you enable their cookies. That’s just plain dumb! It is quite possible to build a complete retail site without cookies, as evidenced by the vast majority of retail websites that do quite well without them. So, in the hopes of collecting a little marketing information of dubious value this outfit drives away paying customers!
What ticked me off even more is that they claim they need to use cookies to determine what browser you’re using. Any programmer knows that that’s bull-poopy. Browser application and version are header fields sent with the http request. Ordinarily I would have gone ahead and permitted their cookies and continued shopping – but seeing as how they lied about why they need cookies I decided to take my money elsewhere.
Spybot has a tool that allows you to look through the list of cookies and select the ones you want to keep (like C&F) and delete the rest. It remembers your choice so the next time you just have to hit the delete cookies option and it will still save the ones you want.
Angelo