What are cookies?
Cookies are files that contain information about the user. The cookie mechanism was introduced in the HTTP protocol to enable distinguishing visiting users.
It is thanks to them that, among other things, our visits to the site and our preferences are remembered (e.g. the language of the site, products in the online store or even place of residence).
Owners of websites are able to determine the interests of their users through cookies, create statistics on the number of visits to the sites and display advertisements for products that may be of interest to us.
In short, thanks to cookies, websites and advertisements placed on them are adapted to us individually, making them much more attractive.
How do cookies work?
They are saved at the request of the server or a script on the user's browser. Despite the name, a single cookie is often not saved as a single file on the disk (Internet Explorer stores all cookies from a given site in a single file, while browsers such as Firefox and Chrome store it in an SQLite database).
We can divide them into session files (temporary), permanent and third-party cookies. Session files are stored until you log out of the service or close your browser, while the latter are stored for a certain period of time specified in the cookie file. Third-party cookies are files that come from, among others, advertising servers, service providers or company servers. This type is used in advertisements.
Cookies can be deleted by the user at any time.
In 2012, the European Union imposed on website owners the obligation to inform about the use of cookies on the website (effectively, the regulations came into force on March 22, 2013).